ITI makes first licensing deal with CXR and Artemis

Dundee, Scotland-based ITI Life Sciences has signed its first commercialization licences. Fellow Scottish firm CXR Biosciences and Germany's Artemis Pharmaceuticals may commercialize ITI's technology and services aimed at improving the discovery and development of new drugs, which have been jointly developed in the ITI R&D in which they participate.

The three-year L5.5 million ($10.3 million) research program involving CXR and Artemis, which commenced in February 2005, is designed to develop novel ways of testing potential new drugs to see whether they are likely to work and be safe before they go into clinical trials in humans. This stage of the drug development process is a crucial industry bottleneck. ITI estimates that the global market for such metabolism and toxicity testing is estimated to be currently worth $3.0 billion per annum.

As a result of its R&D efforts, ITI developed a new model to test for and predict toxicity. Commercial licence for this model covering Europe and Japan has been granted to CXR and Artemis and the model is expected to be sold by the two companies to pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. ITI will receive royalties on sales of the product which will be re-invested in this and other programs. Financial terms were not disclosed.