The firm was chosen by US biotech company Cequent Pharmaceuticals to co-develop the clinical supplies in order to cut down on pre-clinical development time, Peter Parker, Cequent's CEO told Outsourcing-Pharma.com. "We could have developed a method ourselves but using Cobra's technology will save us approximately three months to get it into the clinic," he said.

"At this stage, it's an evaluation but if the outcome is satisfying, there will be milestones and royalties for Cobra."

The objective of this agreement is to develop a treatment for an inherited form of bowel tumour - familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) - using Cequent's TransKingdom RNA interference (tfRNAi) technology combined with Cobra's antibiotic free maintenance technology (ORT).

FAP is a genetic syndrome characterised by the formation of hundreds of polyps in the colon and rectum which usually leads to colorectal cancer.

RNAi technology is hailed as the greatest medical advancement since antibiotics, with the potential to cut out the genes that cause diseases such as cancer.

However, a major obstacle for translating RNAi technology from a research tool into a realistic therapeutic strategy remains the efficient delivery of these small molecules to the targeted cell type in vivo.

Parker agreed stressing that with RNAi technology, the key question is the delivery.

"Ninety five per cent of the technologies on the market are based on modifying the RNAi to make it ready to be delivered," he said.

"We use a biological approach. It is neither better nor worse, it's a different approach. So we are not in competition with firms who use the chemical approach," he said.

Cequent has an exclusive licence to its RNAi based technology - tkRNAi - which was invented and developed over the past five years at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, at Harvard Medical School. With this new technique, non-pathogenic bacteria are used as engines to simultaneously produce and deliver RNAi.

"Interference RNA (RNAi) has great potential for medicine, and Cequent's tkRNAi technology clearly represents an important breakthrough for the difficult, but exciting field of RNAi delivery," said David Thatcher, CEO at Cobra.

"We believe the combination of Cobra's ORT technology with Cequent's in vivo delivery platform will have significant clinical benefit."

Cobra's ORT technology enables create totally stable genetically engineered strains of micro-organisms without the use of antibiotics or antibiotic genes. Other current technologies rely on either integrating the synthetic genes into the bacterial chromosome or using antibiotics to amplify replicating mini-chromosomes containing the new genes.

However, while both methods lead to poor strain productivity and instability, Cobra claims that its ORT technology avoids these problems.

Parker told Outsourcing-Pharma.com that it is currently unknown how long the evaluation with Cobra will take but he said his company hopes to be able to file an Investigational New Drug (IND) application in 18 months.

"If the evaluation's results are positive, it could prolong our partnership with Cobra," he said.