Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. has entered into a non-exclusive license agreement that will allow AstraZeneca to utilize Regeneron's VelocImmune technology in its internal research programmes to discover human monoclonal antibodies.

AstraZeneca will conduct the work at Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT) in the UK as part of its recently stated aim of building a biopharmaceutical capability.

AstraZeneca will pay $20 million upfront and will make up to five additional annual payments of $20 million, subject to the ability to terminate the agreement after making the first three additional payments. Upon commercialisation of any antibody products discovered utilizing VelocImmune, AstraZeneca will pay to Regeneron a mid-single-digit royalty on product sales.

"VelocImmune is the centrepiece of Regeneron's suite of technologies for the discovery and development of fully human antibodies," said George D Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., president of Regeneron Research Laboratories and Regeneron's Chief Scientific Officer. "We are pleased that AstraZeneca, a company with a clear strategic commitment to developing therapeutic antibodies, has selected the VelocImmune platform for its internal development programme."

"AstraZeneca is committed to becoming a leader in the area of biologicals and VelocImmune is an important part of our strategy to succeed in this field," said Jan Lundberg, Ph.D., executive VP Global Discovery Research.

Alex Duncan, Ph.D., CAT's SVP Drug Discovery, commented, "This combination of CAT's display technologies and the VelocImmune platform will provide enormous potential for creating antibody therapeutics."

Regeneron's VelocImmune technology offers the potential to increase dramatically the speed and efficiency of discovering fully-human, therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. The VelocImmune platform generates fully human monoclonal antibodies (hMAbs) to address clinically relevant targets of therapeutic interest. The VelocImmune mouse, unlike other hMAb mice, mounts a robust immune response that is virtually indistinguishable from that of a wild type mouse, resulting in a reliable and efficient platform for discovering fully human monoclonal antibodies.