genOway specialises in developing genetically modified laboratory mice and rats that can serve as models for human diseases.
The €4 million fund-raising will be used to support the growth of the company in the development of tailor-made transgenic mice and rats and in the launching of proprietary mice and rat models, said genOway in a statement.
Earlier this year, genOway was involved in the establishment of a research consortium to bring together pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies with the objective of developing animals with specific genetic modifications (so-called knock-out and knock-in rats), that could be used in the discovery of drugs for diseases such as hypertension, obesity, diabetes and neurological disorders.
The company is also developing a proprietary nuclear transfer technology that aims to develop genetically modified rat models - knock-out rats - within two years.
The research agreement with Pfizer calls for genOway to provide Pfizer researchers in the US with a genetically modified rat model based on its nuclear transfer technology. This is the French company's second partnership to generate conditional knock-out and knock-in rat models, after Altana, since achieving cloning Ralph the rat last year.
Given the similarity between rat and human physiology, the rat is a crucial animal model for the study of many human diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, obesity and diabetes. Nuclear transfer is the only technology able to generate complex genetically modified rat models such as conditional knock-out and humanisation, whereas others - such as chemical mutagenesis - can only introduce mutations in the genome.
A discussion of the value that can be achieved using genetically modified rats in research is available here on the US National Institutes of Health website.