Pfenex Inc., an industry leader in protein expression through the Pfenex Expression Technology platform and Boehringer Ingelheim International GmbH, a leading pharmaceutical company and global leader in biopharmaceutical contract development and manufacture, announced that they have entered into a strategic agreement. It provides Boehringer Ingelheim with non-exclusive access to the Pfenex Expression Technology.

Under the terms of the multi-year agreement, Pfenex Inc. will engineer production strains and processes for Boehringer Ingelheim’s proprietary molecules, and molecules from Boehringer Ingelheim’s contract manufacturing customers. This collaboration provides Boehringer Ingelheim and their customers with access to an industry-leading expression platform to enable preclinical and clinical development to progress much more quickly and efficiently.

“We are very pleased to have established this agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim,” said Dr Bertrand Liang, CEO of Pfenex Inc. “This partnership combines a cutting edge expression technology with the leading innovative pharmaceutical company and contract services provider, facilitating the speed and reliability with which important new drugs can be brought to patients.”

“This collaboration extends our contract manufacturing service portfolio by an additional high expression system and is a further step in our strategy to offer customers leading technologies”, stated Simon Sturge, corporate senior vice president of the Biopharmaceuticals Division at Boehringer Ingelheim. “The Pfenex Expression Technology delivers excellent expression rates, and we are looking forward to realizing customer projects with this technology.”

Pfenex Inc. is a protein production company leveraging the unique and powerful Pfenex Expression Technology platform based on the micro-organism, Pseudomonas fluorescens, for the production of research proteins, reagent proteins, bio-similars and innovator biopharmaceuticals.

The Boehringer Ingelheim group is one of the world’s 20 leading pharmaceutical companies and has been committed for researching, developing, manufacturing and marketing novel products of high therapeutic value for human and veterinary medicine.