VTU in Licencing Deal with RCT

Austrian contract research company VTU has entered into a development and commercialisation agreement with US company RCT. The partners want to combine both companies' Pichia pastoris protein production technologies under VTU's roof.

VTU Technology GmbH, a subsidiary of VTU Holding, will offer the technologies for the production of proteins with human-like glycosylation in one package. Under the terms of the agreement, Research Corporation Technologies Inc. (RCT) grants VTU access to RCT's Pichia expression system for combination with VTU's in-house high-yielding Pichia platform featuring different proprietary technologies such as AOX1 promoter libraries suited for both methanol-induced and methanol-free production. VTU Technology is now offering the combined technology suite as part of the company´s expression strain and corresponding bioprocess development contract services portfolio.

“Our partnership with VTU Technology brings together two technologies that will enable customers to uniquely tailor the glycosylation of their target protein and explore new biological functions,” states Kurt R. Gehlsen, Vice President and CSO of RCT. And Thomas Purkarthofer, Head of Business Development of VTU Technology: “We are delighted to offer Pichia GlycoSwitch engineered with our broad portfolio of Pichia tools in this partnership with RCT and I am convinced that our yield enhancing technologies will give GlycoSwitch an exciting extra edge for the production of glycoproteins with Man5 - or other human-like glycoforms."