Sartorius Stedim Biotech and GE Healthcare sign agreement
Agreement covers IP relating to biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies
Sartorius Stedim Biotech has entered into a cross-licensing agreement with GE Healthcare Life Sciences, which will allow each company to develop its biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies.
Under the agreement, UK-headquartered GE Healthcare Life Sciences gains a sub-licence to certain patents held by the University of Maryland (UMBC) to which France-based Sartorius Stedim Biotech has access under an exclusive agreement with Fluorometrix, a spin-off of UMBC. These patent rights cover bioreactors with at least two optical sensors for monitoring biotechnological manufacturing processes.
Sartorius Stedim Biotech gains a sub-licence to patent rights that GE Healthcare Life Sciences has licensed from SciLog, an innovator in automated and single-use purification systems, as well as disposable sensor technology. These patent rights cover proprietary technologies for the automated, aseptic transfer of solutions in bioprocessing applications.
The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The agreement will enable GE Healthcare Life Sciences to advance the controls of single use devices, said Catarina Flyborg, general manager of BioProcess Products at GE Healthcare Life Sciences.
‘Furthermore our customers will profit from the freedom to employ these proprietary control mechanisms, without violating patent rights, when sourced from either GE Healthcare Life Sciences or Sartorius Stedim Biotech,’ she said.
Reinhard Vogt, executive vice president of marketing, sales and services at Sartorius Stedim Biotech, added: ‘The agreement will enable both our companies to provide a greater selection of products as well as accelerate the development of new and innovative technologies for applications in the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry.’
