Pregenen, Cellectis partner to develop meganucleases

Cellectis (Alternext: ALCLS), the French genome engineering specialist, announced today the signing of a collaboration agreement with Pregenen, an American biotechnology start-up company dedicated to the creation of innovative tools for genome engineering.

Pregenen is a spinoff from the Northwest Genome Engineering Consortium, a group that brings in renowned international researchers from the Seattle Children's Research Institute, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Seattle) and the University of Washington. This start-up company specializes in the development of new methods for gene repair and innovative approaches in gene therapy.

The collaboration agreement between these two companies will allow them to combine their expertise and technological advances to produce improved high-performance genome engineering tools, most notably meganucleases and advanced meganuclease vector technologies. The agreement also includes the development of meganucleases for use in key therapeutic applications.

"We are very pleased to join our nuclease platform and vectorization technologies with those developed by the Northwest Genome Engineering Consortium," stated Andre Choulika, Chairman and CEO of Cellectis. "Our combined expertise will produce the most advanced genome engineering reagents available."

SOURCE Cellectis