NEW YORK — Active Motif and EpiCypher said on Monday that they have signed a cross-licensing agreement for intellectual property covering their respective CUT&Tag chromatin profiling technologies, ending patent infringement litigation between the companies.
CUT&Tag is a targeted transposition technique that enables high-resolution genomic mapping of histone modifications and chromatin-associated proteins through the insertion of DNA sequences into the genome using the Tn5 transposase enzyme.
Each company owns or controls patents related to complementary aspects of targeted transposition. In late 2020, Carlsbad, California-based Active Motif filed a patent infringement lawsuit against EpiCypher, which later countersued.
The companies said that they have now signed an agreement under which they will provide each other with a nonexclusive, royalty-bearing license to their IP for the commercialization of products, kits, and services that use their patented technologies. They have also agreed to pool their IP to sublicense their targeted tagmentation technology for different applications including single-cell and spatial genomics assays. The arrangement effectively ends the legal dispute.
"The partnership between EpiCypher and Active Motif is a natural fit, and we look forward to working [together] … to maximize the impact of CUT&Tag technology on chromatin science and drug development," Martis Cowles, chief business officer of Durham, North Carolina-based EpiCypher, said in a statement.