Sygnis AG announced that Navicyte Scientific, part of Sygnis Group in the US, and the European Collection of Authenticated Cell Cultures (ECACC), part of Public Health England, an agency of the United Kingdom Department of Health, have entered into a collaboration agreement for licensing and distributing the Caco-2 cell line to commercial companies.

Under the collaboration, ECACC will organize that companies obtain the license for the use of the Caco-2 cell line from Sygnis in the US and afterwards will provide the Caco-2 materials directly.

“We are very happy about this collaboration agreement with ECACC,” Pilar de la Huerta, Co-CEO and CFO of Sygnis AG commented. “Up to now, the majority of our Caco-2 business has been in the US. This new collaboration will expand our Caco-2 activities to Europe and increase the commercialization potential for Sygnis, as ECACC is very active in the distribution of cell lines to researchers. ECACC has a large customer data base and they will include our Caco-2 cell line in their project developments.”

Caco-2 cells were developed by the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and are now available from ECACC. ECACC is authorized to distribute these cells to the scientific community for the use in research and Sygnis currently holds an exclusive license from the MSKCC for the commercial use of the Caco-2 cell line. The primary use of this cell line is in pharmaceutical drug development, particularly for absorption of orally bioavailable molecules and transporter studies. The Caco-2 assay is well characterized and is the recognized gold standard for absorption assays. It is part of many standard preclinical (ADME) substance characterization packages used by the pharmaceutical industry.

Sygnis AG is specialized in the development and the commercialization of proprietary technologies and offers a wide range of different commercial products addressing key challenges in molecular biology.