Genomatica Partners With Unilever to Develop Technologies

Genomatica, a leading systems biology company addressing metabolism-driven product opportunities announced today it has entered into a multi-year collaboration and license agreement with Unilever, a global manufacturer of leading brands in foods, home care and personal care. This new agreement expands on projects the two companies started working together on in 2005. Under the latest collaboration, the companies will be working closely together to take advantage of Genomatica's unique metabolic modeling and simulation technologies to accelerate the development of novel ingredients to improve the effectiveness of Unilever products. The Metabolic models developed by Genomatica will be tightly integrated with experimental and domain expertise at Unilever to create a powerful integrated discovery platform that the companies will use together to accelerate and enable product R&D efforts at Unilever. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed, but include research and development support, technology license fees, and milestone payments with Genomatica retaining commercial rights to discoveries for applications outside of Unilever's fields of interest. "We are excited to be partnering with a company whose products have such a significant positive impact on the day-to-day lives of consumers world-wide," commented Christophe H. Schilling, Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer at Genomatica. "Over the years we have established our technology for engineering metabolism to produce valuable bio-derived products, and are now taking strides together with Unilever to expand the application range to aid in the development of next generation home and personal care products. Unilever has recognized the need to capitalize on our systems biology approaches to guide the development of novel products, and we look forward to a productive and fruitful collaboration with the Unilever team." "Unilever is very excited at the prospect of working with Genomatica in this cutting edge area of science and using open innovation to engage with the new ways of working which Genomatica will bring to our product design," says Dominic Tildesley, Chief Scientist for Home and Personal Care of Unilever.