The agreement follows in the footsteps of drug giant Merck & Co, who signed a contract in February this year for the use of the Pfenex Expression Technology, a Pseudomonas-based technology that expresses proteins in high yields.
The Abbott product under agreement is a confidential proprietary protein discovered by Abbott scientists.
Under the agreement, the US pharmaceutical company will have a non-exclusive license to use Pfenex Expression Technology for development and manufacture of the human therapeutic.
Dowpharma global business director Nick Hyde said in a statement: "This agreement with Abbott is yet another validation in a long line of agreements by the pharmaceutical industry that our technologies continue to deliver valued solutions. We are pleased to work with Abbott to help fulfill its future protein production needs as part of this commercial license agreement."
Abbott declined to talk to US-PharmaTechnologist.com about the deal.
Pfenex Expression Technology, which has been applied in the pharmaceutical industry since the beginning of 2005, is a method where non-pathogenic Pseudomonas fluorescens bacteria, commonly found in soil, is modified to express specific proteins.
Dowpharma has been able to screen strains of the bacterium and produce distinct proteins requested by the pharmaceutical industry, which can be used for vaccines, human growth hormone and cancer-fighting antigens.
Escherichia coli and yeast are common techniques currently used to express proteins, but Dowpharma's technology expresses proteins in a higher yield with correct disulfide bond formation, reduced protease levels, and enhanced solubility. These factors mean there is a significant reduction in the number of steps required to make the proteins active.
The technology is easily employed in traditional fermentation, recovery and purification settings with no need for additional, unique equipment, and the production process contains no animal derived products and no antibiotics or antibiotic selection markers, making scale-up safe, efficient and cost effective, according to Dowpharma.
The technology has a "library" of more than 80 proprietary strains.
Late last year, the firm said it had seen over a 100 per cent increase in the adoption of its technology in the first half of 2006 over the same period in 2005.
At the same time, the company claimed there was a good chance that Pfenex would increasingly replace E. coli as a first-line expression technology as the complexity of new drug candidates continued to increase.
Dowpharma elected in 2004 not to go ahead with plans to build a mammalian cell production facility at its Smithfield site in the US, which has since been closed, in favor of concentrating on other technologies, such as Pfenex that can enhance microbial fermentation.
In February, Dowpharma announced that Merck & Co had signed an agreement to use the technology for a proprietary protein vaccine component.
Agreements to use the technology have also been made with Serum Institute of India and Biovel Life Sciences.