ITI Life Sciences Signs License Agreements with Edinburgh Instruments and Almac Sciences

ITI Life Sciences announced the signing of two Commercialization License agreements based on intellectual assets created during ITI Life Sciences’ Fluorescence Lifetime Assay Programme, using fluorescence lifetime for 3-D cell-based assays and other applications.

The first licence, signed with Almac Sciences (Scotland) Ltd, is for intellectual property relating to fluorescent dyes and their uses. Almac Sciences has acknowledged expertise in the provision of complex and challenging peptides and proteins.

The technologies developed by the company open up new opportunities in the biological and medicinal sciences and address the global requirement for ever more advanced and sophisticated polypeptides and proteins. Almac Sciences (Scotland) Ltd is part of the global Almac Group.

The second licence was signed with Edinburgh Instruments, which is globally recognised for the development and manufacture of high-tech fluorescence optoelectronics instrumentation.

The intellectual property licensed relates to a Fluorescence Lifetime Plate Reader with high sensitivity and versatility, which Edinburgh Instruments will be selling into the High Throughput Screening and Drug Discovery Market.

Work on the development of both in vitro and lab-on-a-chip based applications for this system is already ongoing with two Scottish universities. A viable assay to replace radiometric methods for protein kinases has already been demonstrated in the laboratories at Dundee University. Lifetime gives superior capabilities over Radiometric and existing Fluorescence assays.

The programme, which was funded and managed by ITI Life Sciences, ran for only 18 months, but the announcement demonstrates the intellectual property produced by the programme, which enables Edinburgh Instruments and Almac to launch products incorporating ITI IP to the Life Sciences market.

Dr Eleanor Mitchell, ITI Life Sciences’ acting CEO, said: “The signing of these licences will help accelerate the introduction of exciting products into the fluorescence lifetime instrumentation market and we wish both companies every success. ITI Life Sciences aims to license our valuable intellectual assets for the maximum commercial and economic impact for Scotland. We are pleased that our Research Providers decided to undertake the commercialisation of these outputs of the programme and have now negotiated these licenses with ITI Life Sciences.”