Oxford BioMedica plc

Established in 1995, the Company specialises in the application of gene-based technology to the development of novel therapeutics. Its three principal activities are in the fields of gene therapy, immunotherapy and genomics, and its principal therapeutic areas are in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Oxford BioMedica plc was floated on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange in December 1996, and upgraded to the United Kingdom Listing Authority Official List in April 2001 following a successful £35.5 million fund-raising.

Oxford BioMedica has operating centres in Oxford, UK and San Diego, USA

Currently Oxford BioMedica has corporate collaborations with Aventis, AstraZeneca, IDM, Nycomed Amersham, Valentis, Virbac and Wyeth. BioMedica has two products in Phase I/II clinical trials: MetXia^® for late-stage breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and TroVax™ for late-stage colorectal cancer.

Modex Therapeutics

Modex Therapeutics is a publicly listed Swiss biotechnology company, founded in 1996 with a focus on tissue repair, regeneration and replacement (T3R). T3R represents a new approach to medicine, with the goal of repairing or regenerating human tissues or organs affected by disease, trauma or premature ageing. Registered shares of Modex Therapeutics (MDXN) are traded on the SWX New Market.

Under an agreement dated July 1999, Modex took a license for BioMedica's LentiVector^® technology to develop a device to secrete insulin in patients with insulin-dependent diabetes, aimed at obviating the need for insulin injections. Modex aimed to encapsulate b-islet cells from a donor pancreas in order to construct a device that would secrete insulin in response to fluctuations in glucose concentrations. LentiVector^® was licensed to genetically modify the donor pancreatic cells to prevent their rapid death following encapsulation.

Under the agreement, BioMedica received annual maintenance fees. All product development costs under the programme were met by Modex.

In gene therapy, the aim is to deliver a gene and its necessary regulatory elements (the gene construct) to the cell surface, using a vector to mediate the transfer across the cell membrane and, in some cases, into the nucleus. A new and increasingly powerful vector system is based on lentiviruses, which have similar features to retroviruses in the ease of manipulation, predictable integration and reliable gene expression and regulation. However, their main advantage over retroviruses is the ability to function in non-dividing cells or cells that are dividing slowly - a feature of many clinically important tissues.

Oxford BioMedica is a leader in the development and application of lentiviral vectors. Its proprietary LentiVector^® technology is protected by international patents, including US patents for which notice of allowance was received in 2001.