Master Collaboration Pact Links UCSF With ChondroGene; Will Others Follow?

Toronto-based ChondroGene, a 7-year-old genomics firm, has entered into a single collaborative agreement with the California Institute of Quantitative Biomedical Research that allows the company to create multiple collaborations with researchers at the University of Californa, San Francisco, without renegotiating each agreement.

UCSF is one of three University of California campuses associated with the institute, along with the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of California, Berkeley.

The agreement seeks to streamline the creation of research collaborations by creating a master template for things like intellectual property rights, disclosure, and licensing.

The San Francisco Business Times reports that the institute is negotiating similar broad agreements with Amgen and Genentech.

Mark Crowell, president of the Association of University Technology Managers, called the agreement "very significant" and said that while similar agreements are already in place elsewhere, he believes they will become more common as the National Academy of Sciences pushes universities to streamline the process of forging collaborations with industry, according to an article in the Business Times.

While financial details of the agreement were not disclosed and ChondroGene is a small player in the new biology economy, the pact reflects the changing nature of academic-industrial R&D collaborations.

ChondroGene, which reported $1.4 million in revenue and a loss of $731,000 for its most recent quarter ending June 30, operates on the idea that detecting changes in blood allows broader inferences on biological activity in the body, and these can be categorized uniquely as a biomarker. The company labels this as the sentinel principal.

The agreement allows the company to supply its sentinel IP with some control, and creates a pathway for commercial development of any applications arising through the collaborations.

The company offers gene-profiling services using the broad survey Affymetrix microarray technology and its own more-focused ChondroGene technology, as well as DNA sequencing.