Intellectual Property
History
When the company was started up, it acquired the exclusive rights to a patent portfolio belonging to Institut Pasteur. The portfolio comprises several patent families covering:
- the use of natural endonucleases from the meganuclease family, such as I-SceI ("cut"); and
- homologous recombination in eukaryots to perform genetic targeting operations ("paste") and in particular the procedure for replacing a copy of a gene in the host genome through integration of a different gene, especially in mammalian cells.
The portfolio also includes patents protecting vectorization methods (e.g. tetanus toxin fragment C for anterograde neuronal transport and self-deleting retroviral vectors, known as sLTR) and DNA recombination and re-writing methods (e.g. re-writing of CpG-depleted genes to escape epigenetic regulation).
These licenses grant the company exclusive rights to 9 patent families , including 40 issued patents, particularly in Europe, the United States and Japan.
The licenses are granted for the duration of the patent and are therefore not subject to renewal. It should be noted that patent duration varies from country to country according to the laws governing intellectual property in, for example, Europe, the United States of America and Japan.
