Ireland's Elan Corp has signed up another heavyweight partner for its NanoCrystals technology, designed to improve the solubility of drug compounds.
It is estimated that around 40 per cent of all medicines on the market suffer from poor water solubility.
The firm's NanoSystems unit has entered into an agreement with Janssen Pharmaceutica, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Janssen and other J&J affiliates will now be able to apply the NanoCrystal technology to a range of their in-house compounds to improve their development characteristics.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Elan stands to receive research license fees, milestone payments for product development and technology transfer activities, and royalties on in-market sales of products commercialised utilizing the NanoCrystal technology.
NanoSytems entered into a license agreement with Bristol-Myers Squibb for the Nanocrystal technology at the end of September.
The delivery system gained its first commercial approval a month earlier, when J&J's NanoCrystal-based version of its immunosuppressant drug Rapamune (sirolimus) was cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).