Accelr8 Announces Sale of two new Licenses for OptiChem® Surface Coatings

Accelr8 Technology Corporation has announced that NanoString Technologies Inc. acquired a license for using OptiChem® coatings on its molecular identification platform. NanoString has stated that it is preparing for commercial launch of its nCounter™ Analysis System.

Accelr8 also announced that SCHOTT Nexterion® (SCHOTT JENAer GLAS GmbH, Jena, Germany) purchased an OptiChem license renewal. The new license enables SCHOTT's Nexterion product group to continue non-exclusive global manufacturing and marketing of OptiChem-coated microarraying slides. The license follows two previous licenses to SCHOTT.

Both licenses require up-front payment of licensing fees and pre-payment of minimum guaranteed royalties to Accelr8. The licenses provided $200,000 in combined cash payments to Accelr8.

According to David Howson, Accelr8’s president, “We are very pleased that NanoString selected OptiChem coatings for their innovative digital gene expression platform. They have exciting technology for molecular bar-coding, and need OptiChem’s ability to reject background interference while providing high capacity for specific target binding. Their technology has very high sensitivity without amplification. It provides a perfect example of the value of OptiChem’s exceptional noise-reduction capabilities.

“We are also impressed that Schott continues to build its market in microarraying products. Sales of their OptiChem-coated slides have grown steadily during their market introduction phase. The new license gives Schott their next market expansion opportunity to stimulate demand for high-performance microarraying.

“We now focus almost all of our resources on developing our BACcel® rapid bacterial diagnostic system. However, we do continue to jointly publish scientific studies and support an exploratory research program at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) for potential new OptiChem applications. As a result, we have ongoing projects with potential industry partners performing product feasibility studies in a variety of areas.

“Our progress with OptiChem licensing reflects our business strategy of licensing our innovative proprietary technology to industry leaders. As with OptiChem, we also intend to license or enter into strategic partnerships with the BACcel system. We are making rapid progress with the BACcel system and entering a new level of discussion with potential industry partners.”