NEW YORK – EpiCypher said Wednesday that it has reached an exclusive licensing agreement with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center related to the CUT&Tag chromatin profiling technology, originally developed by Fred Hutch researcher Steven Henikoff.
The licensed IP covers three key areas of the CUT&Tag technology: cleavage under targeted accessible chromatin (CUTAC); reverse transcribe and tagment (RT&Tag); and CUT&Tag compatibility with formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded samples (CUT&Tag-FFPE) and biomarkers of hypertranscription in cancer.
According to EpiCypher, CUTAC is a new approach for low-input, single-cell, and spatial profiling studies. This IP also contains a streamlined direct-to-PCR workflow that mitigates sample cleanup following tagmentation, enabling assay automation.
Meanwhile, RT&Tag was developed to profile chromatin-bound RNAs and associated RNA modifications with high accuracy.
Lastly, CUT&Tag-FFPE enables high-resolution CUT&Tag and CUTAC workflows compatible with FFPE samples, broadening epigenomic mapping applications for clinical research and precision medicine, EpiCypher said.
"By leveraging these cutting-edge technologies, EpiCypher will advance the capabilities of epigenomics research for biomarker discovery and drug development," EpiCypher said in a statement. "The enhanced sensitivity and versatility of the licensed technologies enables researchers to conduct more precise and comprehensive studies and will accelerate development of emerging single cell and spatial CUT&Tag applications."
EpiCypher said it plans to integrate these technologies into its product and service offerings.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The new licensing agreement appears to build on an existing deal struck in 2021 that granted EpiCypher a co-exclusive license to CUT&RUN (cleavage under targets and release using nuclease) and CUT&Tag chromatin profiling technologies.