Allozyne Inc. announced, the signing of a worldwide, co exclusive licensing agreement with Sigma Aldrich giving Allozyne a license for the use of cycloaddition chemistry in the development of therapeutics and diagnostics. Sigma Aldrich currently holds broad, worldwide intellectual property for the use of cycloaddition chemistry to conjugate biomolecules.

"We are extremely pleased to work with a partner such as Sigma?Aldrich who clearly set the bar for being a leading life sciences company," said Meenu Chhabra, president and CEO of Allozyne. "This partnership will allow us to fortify our leadership position in site specific conjugation of biomoleculescontaining non canonical amino acids to create optimized protein therapeutics in various areas of unmet medical need."

The agreement broadens Allozyne's bioconjugation footprint and enables the company to exclusively explore new paths of therapeutic development. In addition, it cements Allozyne's biociphering platforms, which can modify and optimize virtually any protein sequence, as being the broadest in the field of bioconjugation through the application of cycloaddition chemistry. The announcement follows another recently signed license agreement with The Scripps Research Institute giving Allozyne exclusive rights to a specific type of cycloaddition known as "Click chemistry". Financial details were not disclosed.

Allozyne already holds exclusive rights to platform enabling, biociphering technology originated at Caltech (California Institute of Technology). The technology enables the site specific incorporation of non natural amino acids into proteins which has been shown to be able to make scalable and reproducible quantities of virtually any protein or peptide in both E. coli and mammalian systems.

Allozyne's pre?clinical stage pipeline includes a number of product candidates which are built to address the unmet medical need in a number of disease areas including CNS and autoimmunity as well as a compound currently in human trials.

Headquartered in Seattle, Allozyne was established in late 2005, to commercialize proprietary biociphering technology that it licensed, on an exclusive basis, from the California Institute of Technology.