OXGENE™ announces year of continued growth and first licensing deals in Asia

11 December, 2019 – Oxford. OXGENE™ marks the end of another year of continued growth. The company’s 2019 highlights include signing their first deal in Asia, securing a further £6.5m of new investment and announcing six new licensing deals, among other commercial successes.

OXGENE™, which launched its new brand in September and was named as one of the UK’s fastest growing technology companies in this year’s Deloitte Fast 50, will continue to build on this success with several new licensing deals and custom service projects in the pipeline.

Ryan Cawood, Founder and Chief Executive at OXGENE™ said, “I’m delighted to enter the festive season with the company in such a strong position. OXGENE has grown massively over the last calendar year, and the number of new deals we’ve signed and projects we’ve delivered are testament to the hard work, commitment and quality of our multidisciplinary team.

I’m so pleased to see how many of our customers are becoming long term partners, and thrilled that our increased global exposure is giving us further opportunities to showcase our technical excellence and well-deserved market presence.”

Particular highlights to note from this year include the extension of OXGENE’s long-term supply agreement with Abcam for CRISPR-based gene editing services. As part of this strategic partnership, OXGENE™ will use its expertise in CRISPR gene-editing to deliver over 1,000 custom engineered cell lines for antibody validation over the next three years. Abcam is also offering these cell lines as an expansion of its portfolio of off-the-shelf knockout cell lines matched with antibodies.

Further commercial successes this year include licensing deals for OXGENE’s proprietary plasmids and cell lines. These, along with the ability to support evaluation and scale up projects, have led to several evaluation agreements with large pharmaceutical companies, which the company hopes will develop into more significant licensing arrangements in the new year. OXGENE’s other commercial wins of 2019, including their first Asian licensing deals, remain confidential.

OXGENE also reports numerous scientific successes this year. A breakthrough in their new mammalian display antibody discovery system means the company has now opened this platform for commercial evaluations, and a further, very recent discovery will be announced and launched in the new year, relating to improved AAV manufacture.

OXGENE ends the year in a strong position to secure future growth, through a further £6.5 million of new investment and an expanded executive team.

About OXGENE™

OXGENE finds solutions to seemingly impossible problems. Our unique combination of precision engineering and breakthrough science, together with advanced robotics and bioinformatics, accelerates the rational design, discovery and manufacture of cell and gene therapies.

We work at the very edge of impossible. We solve the problem of high-titre, scalable virus manufacture for gene therapy treatments. We address the challenge of speed and robustness in gene editing with our high throughput, automated CRISPR platform. We use our novel mammalian display technology to discover antibodies against previously intractable membrane proteins.

OXGENE™ accelerates the discovery and production of cell and gene therapies, addressing key industry bottlenecks and facilitating new therapeutic approaches. We redefine ‘possible’ in mammalian cell engineering.