Cellectis SA, a biotechnology company specialized in genome engineering, today announced a license agreement with Diversa Corporation, leader in the field of directed evolution and protein engineering.

Under this agreement, Cellectis granted a non-exclusive Research Use Only License, with an option for a Commercial License, for the use of its patented Meganuclease I-SceI technology.

Financial terms and conditions of the agreement were not disclosed.

I-SceI, a very rare natural endonuclease used to induce a unique and site directed double strand break in the genome of host organism, is today the most widely used for research and genome engineering. Diversa researchers will use Cellectis technology in different strains of microorganisms, mainly in order to improve the
functionality of production hosts organism.

“I-SceI meganuclease has already been evaluated by Diversa and has been successful. One of the advantages is the generation of “markerless” recombinants” said Isabelle Pelletier-Bressac, Vice President, Business Development of Cellectis.

“We are very happy with this agreement with a partner such as Diversa, Inc.” she added. “I-SceI has become the gold standard for meganuclease site-directed induced-recombination, and has been successfully used in a wide range of species.

We are very confident about the potential commercial applications for strains improvement and that our technology will become the method of choice for the generation of nucleotide substitutions. Cellectis technologies, based on I-SceI meganuclease, can help to reduce the cost of production and improve the quality of pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products obtained from engineered microorganisms.”

Cellectis SA was founded in 1999, as a spin-off from the Institut Pasteur. It is the first company to apply the Meganuclease Recombination System approach to in vivo genome engineering. The company is developing Meganucleases that can target a unique DNA break in vivo, as a fundamentally enabling technology for commercial applications in human therapeutics, pharmaceutical discovery, agriculture and industrial biotechnology. Cellectis has already entered into 20 deals for the use of its genome engineering technologies, covering a wide range of applications such as animal models, protein production or agricultural crops improvement.