Cellectis and VitamFero Collaborate to Develop Vaccines against Parasitic Infection

Paris and Evry (France), June 6, 2011 – Cellectis (Alternext: ALCLS), the genome engineering specialist, and VitamFero, a biotech company of the Genopole® portfolio developing new vaccines against parasite infections, announced the signing of a research, development and licensing partnership agreement. This agreement will grant VitamFero access to Cellectis’ proprietary meganuclease technology for the design and development of a new generation of living attenuated vaccines.

Under this 5-year agreement, Cellectis will supply VitamFero with preselected méganucléases for initial use in the development of vaccines against parasites responsible for toxoplasmosis, neosporosis, and others...

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About Cellectis

Cellectis improves life by applying its genome engineering expertise to a broad range of applications, including agriculture, bioresearch and human therapeutics. Cellectis is listed on the NYSE-Euronext Alternext market (code: ALCLS) in Paris.


About VitamFero

Created in 2005 and having just completed a significant raise of 1.1 M€, VitamFero exploits the breakthroughs jointly obtained and patented by CNRS, INRA and Université François Rabelais in Tours (France) in the domain of antiparasite vaccines, an area where needs are still largely unmet. VitamFero is built on a strong and validated scientific basis, based on the development of living parasite strains (i.e. Toxoplasma gondii, …), attenuated by complete and targeted deletion of virulence genes... [PDF] Cellectis' Press Release - PDF du communiqué de presse de VitamFero -

Cellectis : publication of a paper entitled "Computer design of obligate heterodimer meganucleases allows efficient cutting of custom DNA sequences"..

April 22nd 2008 - Cellectis SA, the rational genome engineering company specializing in the production of meganuclease recombination systems and in meganuclease engineering, announced the publication of a new paper in the high-profile Nucleic Acids Research journal (Fajardo-Sanchez et al., Computer design of obligat heterodimer meganucleases allows efficient cutting of custom DNA sequences, Nucleic Acids Res. 2008, Feb. 14th [Epub ahead of print])...
... In this study, researcher from CRG modified two engineered meganucleases from Cellectis’ collection, in order to improve their specificity. Most engineered meganucleases so far are heterodimers derived from the dimeric I-CreI protein. Heterodimer formation is obtained by coexpression of two monomers in the targeted cell, and is actually associated with the formation of two homodimers recognizing different targets. This results in a loss of specificity, which can be solved only by the suppression of homodimer formation. To address this problem, CRG researchers have modified the protein-protein interface of the two proteins in order to abolish homodimerisation. This design could in principle be applied to every and any heterodimer produced by Cellectis... [PDF] Cellectis' Press Release - PDF du Communiqué de Presse de Cellectis -