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ERS Genomics Licenses CRISPR-Cas9 Patents to Charles River Laboratories

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – ERS Genomics said today that it has signed a non-exclusive license agreement for its CRISPR-Cas9 patents with Charles River Laboratories.

Charles River, which uses CRISPR-Cas9 for target screening and to create custom knock-in and knockout cell lines for drug discovery applications, said it will use the license to offer its customers a larger range of in vivo and in vitro genome editing services.

"Charles River has a reputation for excellent science and we are pleased to include them as one of the leading worldwide contract research organizations into our portfolio of licensees," ERS CEO Eric Rhodes said in a statement. "Overall, 2017 has been a very successful year for ERS in making the CRISPR-Cas9 patents widely accessible to biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. Today's announcement represents a total of 12 licensing agreements this year with companies of all sizes."

ERS Genomics is a company set up to commercialize the CRISPR/Cas9 intellectual property rights assigned to Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin.

ERS has signed multiple licensing agreements with various companies for its technology in recent months including with Oxford Genetics and Taconic Biosciences in May, with DuPont Pioneer in June, and with Cellecta in November. And yesterday, ERS and Horizon Discovery Group announced that they had agreed to expand their pre-existing, non-exclusive, worldwide license agreement covering Horizon's use of ERS' CRISPR technology.

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