Amgen and Genentech are also using Sangamo's zinc finger proteins to improve their manufacturing yields.
Sangamo scientists tether to the zinc finger a protein that contains the instructions for the targeted gene: turn on, turn off, get louder, pipe down.
He came across a 1991 article on zinc finger proteins published in Science by Carl Pabo, then a structural biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dow Agro will likely sign an exclusive commercial licensing agreement with Sangamo between now and October, paying it royalties on sales of products developed using zinc finger proteins.
Because Sangamo Chief Executive Edward Lanphier obtained exclusive licenses from the handful of academics working on zinc-finger proteins, Sangamo has a near lock on patents relating to zinc-finger proteins.
In October 2005 Dow AgroSciences entered into an exclusive research agreement with Sangamo BioSciences, a biotech company in Richmond, Calif. that controls most of the intellectual property around zinc finger research.
When zinc fingers are used to delete genetic material, the mechanism for doing so, called a zinc finger nuclease, does not remain in the plant for more than a few days.
This technology, which Dow AgroSciences is moving toward the market, is called a zinc finger, a naturally occurring protein that can be used in a cell nucleus like an editor's red pencil.
Dana Carroll, a biochemist at the University of Utah who has licensed some research to Sangamo, has run fruit fly experiments using zinc finger nucleases in which the flies' genomes were cut in unintended places apart from the target area.
Zinc fingers, so named because they contain a zinc atom and are shaped like an index finger, can turn specific genes off or on or to some point in between, delete genes altogether or add new genetic material.
应用推荐