Benitec licensee's deal to commercialise Hep C drugWednesday,...

Benitec licensee's deal to commercialise Hep C drug
Wednesday, March 12, 2008; Posted: 06:32 PM

Sydney, Mar 13, 2008 (RWE via COMTEX) -- BNIKF | news | PowerRating | PR Charts -- (RWE Australian Business News) Benitec Ltd (ASX:BLT) licensee Tacere Therapeutics Inc of San Jose, California and Oncolys BioPharma Inc of Tokyo have announced a licence agreement to develop and commercialise Tacere's RNA interference (RNAi) based hepatitis C virus (HCV) compound TT-033 throughout Asia.

This agreement resulted from the strategic alliance by Tacere and Oncolys in June 2007, whereby Oncolys was granted an option to acquire the Asian rights for the compound known as TT-033/OBP-701.

The deal is seen as validating the Benitec ddRNAi "expressed" approach for treating chronic infectious diseases including hepatitis C.

As previously announced, Benitec has an equity holding in Tacere Therapeutics and it also receives milestone and royalty payments.

Under the agreement, Oncolys and Tacere will form a joint steering committee to work with Tacere and Pfizer to oversee preclinical research and development of TT-033/OBP-701.

In addition to an up-front payment, Tacere will be eligible to receive milestone payments through achieving development, approval and commercialisation milestones, resulting in total potential payments to Tacere of up to $US60m.

Upon commercialisation of TT-033/OBP-701, Tacere would be entitled to receive royalties on net sales by Oncolys.