SenzaGen signs key license agreement in the US with Burleson Research Technologies
Lund, March 7, 2018 – SenzaGen (Nasdaq First North: SENZA) announces today that the company has signed a strategically important license agreement with the well renowned Burleson Research Technologies Inc. (BRT). BRT will market and provide GARD™ in the US and perform the test in its laboratory in North Carolina. BRT is the first US laboratory to offer GARD™, which displays a higher accuracy than other available test methods and reveals if chemical substances are causing allergies in humans.
Burleson Research Technologies, Inc. (BRT) is a contract research organisation (CRO) in the US, specializing in immunotoxicology. The company is an important supplier of chemical safety testing for the cosmetic and chemical industries and participates in ongoing programs to analyse and validate alternative methods, aiming at reducing the use of animals in chemical testing. BRT was part of the successful ring trial in the validation of GARDskin™ which was completed in the autumn of 2017 and showed the unsurpassed accuracy of 93.8%.
Under the terms of the agreement, BRT will immediately include GARDskin™ and GARDpotency™ as a leading part of its chemical safety testing services to clients in the cosmetic, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries worldwide.
“This new license agreement with a highly respected American CRO is a significant step to provide GARD to a broader market and is crucial for meeting the US customers´ demand with local service providers. We are confident that GARD will play a prominent role in the ongoing process to reduce the use of animals in chemical testing. Our test is the best performing in vitro method, outperforming available animal methods”, says SenzaGen’s CEO Anki Malmborg Hager.
“We are looking forward to providing our customers access to the GARDtests – a robust animal free test with high accuracy that has potential to become a widely used method for characterizing allergy provoking properties of chemical substances. Our experiences from participating in the successful validation trial show that that the test is both reliable and easy to perform”, says Gary Burleson, CEO of Burleson Research Technologies.
For more information:
Anki Malmborg Hager, CEO
SenzaGen AB
Email: anki.malmborg.hager@senzagen.com
Telephone: +46 768 284822
Florence Burleson, Executive VP,
Burleson Research Technologies, Inc.
Email: fburleson@brt-labs.com
Telephone: +1 919-719-2500
About Burleson Research Technologies
Burleson Research Technologies (BRT) is a Contract Research Organization (CRO) in North Carolina that provides laboratory services to clients from the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, chemical manufacturing, government, and healthcare industries with proof-of-concept, preclinical immunotoxicology studies.
About GARD™
GARD™ is a group of tests for assessing chemical sensitizers. The tests make use of genetic biomarkers for more than 200 genes which cover the entire immune reaction and are relevant to predicting the risk of hypersensitivity. The tests have over 90 percent reliability. This compares with the current predominant test method, experiments on mice, which has an accuracy of 70-75percent. SenzaGen’s tests are also capable of measuring the potency of a substance’s allergenic properties. Consequently, GARD tests provide a much more comprehensive basis for determining whether a substance should be classified as an allergen than current testing methods.
About SenzaGen
SenzaGen makes it possible to replace animal experiments with in vitro genetic testing to determine the allergenicity of the chemicals we come into contact with in our daily lives, such as for example in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, food products and dyes. The company’s patented tests are the most reliable on the market and provide more information than traditional evaluation methods. We ourselves sell the tests in Sweden and the USA, and we sell through partners in several other countries. Over the next few years the company will expand geographically, make alliances with more distribution partners and launch further unique tests. SenzaGen has its headquarters in Lund in Sweden and a subsidiary in San Francisco, USA. For more information visit www.senzagen.com
This information is information that SenzaGen is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation. The information was submitted for publication, through the contact person set out above on the 7 March 2018 at 10:00 CET.
SenzaGen AB are listed on Nasdaq First North in Stockholm and FNCA is the company’s Certified Adviser. For more information, please visit www.senzagen.com