Nomad Bioscience enters into comprehensive agreement with Bayer Innovation

Munich, Jan­u­ary 12, 2012 — NOMAD Bio­science GmbH, Munich, Ger­many (NOMAD) has entered into a series of agree­ments with Bay­er Inno­va­tion GmbH, a Bay­er AG sub­sidiary. The agree­ments include, among oth­ers, the pur­chase of Icon Genet­ics GmbH (ICON), Bay­er Innovation’s sub­sidiary, by NOMAD. NOMAD acquires all shares in ICON and ancil­lary assets, there­by tak­ing over all of ICON’s assets, lia­bil­i­ties and oblig­a­tions, includ­ing per­son­nel, patent port­fo­lio and its GMP-cer­ti­fied man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty in Halle (Saale), Ger­many. The patent port­fo­lio of ICON includes over 320 issued patents rep­re­sent­ing over 40 patent fam­i­lies, and it includes broad patent pro­tec­tion of the mag­nI­CON™ tran­sient expres­sion tech­nol­o­gy as well as a set of tech­nolo­gies for design­er gly­co­sy­la­tion. As a result, ICON will become a whol­ly owned sub­sidiary of NOMAD. In return, the Bay­er group will receive roy­al­ties on future NOMAD prod­ucts that were made with ICON patent­ed tech­nol­o­gy, as well as oth­er undis­closed con­sid­er­a­tions.

Prof. Dr. Yuri Gle­ba, CEO and founder of NOMAD, said: ”The deal makes per­fect sense for NOMAD from the busi­ness point of view, as it cre­ates a com­pa­ny that is much bet­ter able to use its broad­ly enabling tran­sient expres­sion process­es to address var­i­ous mar­kets: bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals — a seg­ment which will con­tin­ue to be ser­viced by ICON — and bio­ma­te­ri­als as well as agro­nom­ic traits to be served by NOMAD.”

Prof. Dr. Wolf­gang Plis­chke, mem­ber of the Board of Man­age­ment of Bay­er AG respon­si­ble for Inno­va­tion, Tech­nol­o­gy and Envi­ron­ment, stat­ed: ”Although we decid­ed to focus our activ­i­ties, we remain very pos­i­tive about this tech­nol­o­gy. NOMAD, with Prof. Gleba’s proven man­age­ment and con­tin­u­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion of Bay­er, is well posi­tioned for fur­ther suc­cess”.

Under the con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ing agree­ment, NOMAD’s sub­sidiary ICON will con­tin­ue man­u­fac­tur­ing the non-Hodgkin’s lym­phoma vac­cines, thus allow­ing Bay­er Inno­va­tion to con­tin­ue its Phase I clin­i­cal tri­als. The finan­cial aspects of the deal have not been dis­closed.

About NOMAD:
NOMAD is a pri­vate biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny devel­op­ing agro­nom­ic traits and plant-made bio­ma­te­ri­als that address crit­i­cal unmet needs. NOMAD’s plant-based tran­sient pro­tein expres­sion tech­nolo­gies are licensed to sev­er­al com­pa­nies for a broad range of prod­ucts. NOMAD’s pro­pri­etary tech­nolo­gies fur­ther improve the upstream part of the man­u­fac­tur­ing process, but they also pro­vide for nov­el down­stream solu­tions that togeth­er with the in-licensed upstream com­po­nents result in a ful­ly inte­grat­ed man­u­fac­tur­ing process for most of NOMAD’s intend­ed prod­ucts. NOMAD’s agro­nom­ic trait pipeline is being devel­oped joint­ly with a major part­ner. NOMAD’s bio­ma­te­r­i­al pipeline con­sists of sev­er­al select­ed prod­uct can­di­dates, includ­ing plant-made cel­lu­lase enzymes (expect­ed impact: up to 30 per­cent low­er man­u­fac­tur­ing cost of bioethanol), and antimi­cro­bial pro­teins, includ­ing col­icins, lysins and bac­te­ri­ocins (unmet needs in food safe­ty and ani­mal health).

The founder and CEO of NOMAD is Prof. Dr. Yuri Gle­ba. Pri­or to found­ing NOMAD in 2008, Dr. Gle­ba co-found­ed two oth­er biotech com­pa­nies, Icon Genet­ics (Ger­many, USA) and Phy­tomedics (USA). He has been the CEO/Managing Direc­tor of Icon Genet­ics since its incep­tion in 1999 and brought it to a suc­cess­ful exit in 2006 by sell­ing the com­pa­ny to Bay­er.