BIOTECHNOLOGY firm Ozgene Pty Ltd has secured an $US8.5 million contract with the National Institute of Health (NIH), a major research institute in the US.
BIOTECHNOLOGY firm Ozgene Pty Ltd has secured an $US8.5 million contract with the National Institute of Health (NIH), a major research institute in the US.
Under the terms of the contract, Ozgene will provide genetically modified animal models for the NIH for five years.
Ozgene director and CEO Dr Frank Koentgen said the contract with the NIH represented the single biggest deal for the company to date.
“This contract clearly acknowledges that Ozgene is internationally recognised as a reliable and innovative service provider [of GM mice and rats],” he said.
“We believe this award has the potential to trigger an avalanche of new projects and customers, which is why we are looking at automation in preparation for that potential.”
Dr Koentgen said the company was now focused on the improvement of scientific processes and would invest $500,000 in robotic machinery to automate up to 40 per cent of lab work processes in the area of tissue culture and geno-typing,
The purchase will facilitate company growth and free-up scientific staff to focus on more in-depth analytical work.
“With the automation, we should significantly increase our throughput by having staff focus on more intellectual and more challenging tasks, rather than manual tasks,” Dr Koentgen said.
“I believe it will have a major input on scalability.”
The company continues to grow exponentially, having already recorded $6 million in revenue this financial year, significantly eclipsing last year’s full financial year revenue of $3.2 million.
Ozgene business development manager Eddie Noonan said the company had experienced 30 per cent growth in invoiced sales in the first six months of this financial year compared with the preceding full financial year.
He said the company had employed 17 new staff in the past six months, with 12 of those appointments being made in the second quarter.
The new custom-built premises, located at Technology Park in Bentley, which the company moved into only six months ago, already has reached capacity in terms of the number of employees that it can comfortably house.
Ozgene has since exercised an option on an adjacent piece of land in Technology Park and plans to extend the existing office and lab facility.
“We definitely expect to occupy the new building this year,” Mr Noonan said.
Mr Noonan said that, having already established a strong client base with major research and pharmaceutical organisations in Australia, the US and Europe, Ozgene was looking to new opportunities in the Japanese market.
“We’ve had a lot of interest shown in Ozgene from Japan,” he said. “There has been a large increase in projects from a variety of customers.”
One such Japanese customer is Kobe University, with Ozgene having been awarded a contract worth $500,000 to provide genetically modified mice models.
In the past three months Ozgene has been awarded contracts from the Riken Institute in Japan and a large pharmaceutical company in the Netherlands. The company also has entered into partnership deals with the Scripps Research Institute and Sangamo Biosciences, both in the US.
The first two contracts provide an R&D contract research service while the latter two aim at providing proof of concept for new technologies in the gene therapy market.
