Novozymes and Dyax sign licensing agreement

Under the terms of the agreement, Dyax has been granted a non-exclusive research and development license for use of Novozymes’ technology to develop albumin fusions of Kunitz domain proteins and antibody fragments for therapeutic and diagnostic applications. As part of the agreement, Dyax also obtained non-exclusive access to Novozymes’s Saccharomyces cerevisiae protein expression platform for the subsequent manufacture of lead albumin fusion molecules.

Novozymes’s S cerevisiae yeast expression platform has been commercially validated for a wide range of biotherapeutic applications and has been proven at commercial-scale through Novozymes’s Recombumin; the only commercially available recombinant human albumin said to be authorized for use in the manufacture of human therapeutics.

Henry Blair, chairman, president and CEO of Dyax, said: “We are very excited about extending our albufuse technology collaboration with Novozymes, and incorporating their S cerevisiae expression platform.”