Enzyme market penetration

BILLERICA, Mass.—A new marketing and distribu­tion agreement signed by Millipore Corp. and JPT Peptide Technologies GmbH, a wholly-owned sub­sidiary of Berlin-based Jerini AG, gives Millipore worldwide, non-exclusive distribution rights for JPT's line of enzyme profiling products and ser­vices targeting enzymes such as kinases, phos­phatases and proteases. This includes JPT's line of enzyme substrate sets and microarrays, which contain thousands of peptides with annotated phosphorylation/cleavage sites to study enzymatic activities and substrate specificities.

Financial details of the deal are still under wraps, but Dr. Holger Wenschuh, managing director at JPT, notes that he fully expects to see increased sales for his company as a result of the deal as Millipore makes it possible for JPT's prod­ucts to reach all major geographical and biomedi­cal markets.

"You will realize that JPT is a pretty small, tech-based company, so we are strong in introduc­ing a new technology to the market," Wenschuh says. "Our drawback is that it is not so easy to give our technolo­gies visibility in the marketplace and develop them as products. This agreement should reduce that problem and I would expect to see our revenues increase over the next few years because of this collaboration."

JPT's peptide-based products strongly complement Millipore's existing portfolio of cell signaling reagents and services, according to Rick Ryan, vice president of the drug discovery business unit for Millipore's Bioscience Division. "This will give Millipore cus­tomers access to patented high-throughput peptide synthesis and screening platforms, which accel­erates research in the field of sig­nal transduction," he says.

"Really, this strengthens our position in the enzyme and drug discovery markets," notes Michael Rashed, strategic marketing man­ager for Millipore, "and allows both us and JPT to serve the market better. JPT can continue to focus on what it is respected for—continuing to advance their technology and produce new inno­vations—while we use our existing market penetration worldwide to expand the reach of those prod­ucts."

Millipore offers a wide range of research products, from specialty reagents and kits to antibodies and molecular biology tools, and it specializes in tools for kinase research. The company also offers ion-channel drug screening servic­es to pharmaceutical companies.

"We applied our peptide synthe­sis and peptide array technologies to develop a series of tailor-made products and services to address the increasing demand in the field of kinase and protease research," Wenschuh says. "We look for­ward to expanding the availability of these tools through Millipore's worldwide, dedicated sales chan­nels."