Cerus Corp. has spun off part of its immunotherapy programs to a newly formed independent company that will be led by two top Cerus executives.

The new, yet-unnamed company is being formed with the backing of a group of venture capitalists, and will be led by David N. Cook as CEO and Thomas W. Dubensky as chief scientific officer. Both come from Cerus' executive management team. From Cerus they take with them the Listeria and KBMA platform technologies.

Cerus will have an equity interest of approximately 15.5 percent of the new company's fully diluted equity, and is eligible for milestones of an additional $1.5 million of equity or cash.

Cerus also is eligible to receive cash milestone payments of more than $90 million, as well as royalty payments, if vaccine candidates generated from the transferred assets are developed and commercialized.

The transaction leaves Cerus solely focused on commercializing the Intercept Blood System.

Both the Intercept platelet and plasma systems are being sold in Europe and in other countries.