Genentech Gains Expanded Access to Sangamo's Protein Production Technology

Sangamo BioSciences, Inc. (Richmond, CA) has entered into a second research and license agreement with Genentech, Inc. (South San Francisco, CA), expanding on the original agreement to include additional targets for potential improvement of production cell lines using Sangamo's proprietary zinc finger DNA-binding protein nuclease (ZFN) technology.

Zinc finger proteins (ZFPs) are the dominant class of naturally occurring transcription factors in organisms from yeast to humans. Transcription factors, which are found in the nucleus of every cell, bind to DNA to regulate gene expression. Though there are many kinds of transcription factors, only ZFPs are amenable to engineering and precise targeting to a particular gene or genes of interest. ZFNs are engineered forms of ZFPs that also contain a nuclease component, which can induce modification of a target gene of interest.