NEW YORK — EpiCypher said on Wednesday that it has acquired a co-exclusive license to the CUT&RUN (Cleavage Under Targets and Release Using Nuclease) and CUT&Tag chromatin profiling technologies from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
According to EpiCypher, CUT&RUN and CUT&Tag use protein A and protein G to tether enzymatic domains to antibody-bound chromatin in immobilized cells or nuclei for controlled and site-selective cleavage in situ. Used to study histone post-translational modifications and chromatin-associated proteins as an alternative to ChIP-seq, the two approaches require tenfold fewer sequencing reads and can accommodate ultra-low cellular inputs, including single-cell analyses, the company said.
EpiCypher said the new license builds on its existing intellectual property portfolio covering CUT&RUN and CUT&Tag workflows for both research-use-only and diagnostic applications. The Research Triangle Park, North Carolina-based company added that it intends to expand its portfolio of CUT&RUN and CUT&Tag products, which are sold under its Cutana brand.
"EpiCypher's Cutana platform is changing the way researchers approach genomic mapping studies, especially for drug development," EpiCypher CSO Michael-Christopher Keogh said in a statement. "This foundational IP gives us the support to build next-generation assays that further improve assay sensitivity, throughput, and cost."