Pepscan Therapeutics, the Dutch biotechnology firm focusing on protein mimicry technology, announced the signing of a research and license agreement with Crucell Holland B.V. (Crucell) the Dutch developer of vaccines and antibodies. In the research collaboration, Crucell will make use of Pepscan's proprietary technology and know-how in Crucell's programme for developing undisclosed novel vaccines to combat infectious diseases.

Under the terms of the agreement, Pepscan will receive research funding and could receive payments on the achievement by Crucell of research and clinical milestones, as well as royalties on sales of products resulting from the collaboration. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

"We are very pleased to collaborate with Crucell, since we strongly believe that Pepscan's CLIPS technology combined with Crucell's expertise in vaccine development will yield breakthrough products", said Wim Mol, CEO of Pepscan. "We are convinced that Pepscan's state-of-the-art epitope mapping technology as well as our expertise in creating conformationally stabilized CLIPS peptides will greatly contribute to the development of novel vaccines. Together with our two recent R&D collaboration and licensing agreements with Tibotec Pharmaceuticals and Mercator Therapeutics, we consider this new agreement a further expression of our leadership position in lead finding and optimization of peptide drugs."
 
Pepscan Therapeutics is a privately held company based in Lelystad, The Netherlands. Pepscan is using its proprietary high throughput CLIPS protein mimicking technology for the development of novel constrained therapeutic peptides and immunogens. Besides its pipeline of proprietary anti-GPCR monoclonal antibody products, Pepscan has various ongoing collaborations with leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies to develop novel therapeutics based on the proprietary CLIPS technology.

CLIPS (Chemical LInkage of Peptides onto Scaffolds) is a technology to present one or more peptides in a structurally constrained configuration. These molecules behave as functional mimics of complex protein domains. CLIPS peptides have been used in antibody and vaccine programmes to create superior immunogens in the generation of antibodies against disease relevant protein targets. This is especially valuable in the case of proteins that are inaccessible as recombinant proteins, such as GPCRs.