By Randall Osborne

West Coast Editor

About two months after sealing with InterMune Inc. a deal worth up to $60 million, Maxygen Inc. has entered another alliance, this one with the overseas giant Aventis Pasteur.

Fewer financial details were disclosed this time around, but the agreement for three years with Lyon, France-based Aventis (a business unit of Aventis SA) is for developing what Maxygen described as ¿improved vaccines for a specific target,¿ not named.

¿We¿ll be creating potentially multiple vaccines for a single focus area,¿ said Alison Trollope, spokeswoman in investor and public relations for Redwood City, Calif.-based Maxygen.

Under the terms, Maxygen gets license fees, full research and development funding, minimum annual royalties, and potential milestone and royalty payments on product sales. Aventis Pasteur takes exclusive worldwide rights to commercialize the vaccines.

¿Essentially, [other] details are confidential, from Aventis¿ standpoint, and therefore from ours,¿ Trollope told BioWorld Today. ¿Obviously, it¿s a great deal for Maxygen, but we¿re not disclosing whether we¿ll improve the vaccine and are handing it over to them, or will be working with them. We¿re also unable to disclose whether it¿s a completely new vaccine, or something already in Aventis¿ pipeline.¿

Nothing has yet reached the preclinical stage, she added.

The research deal with InterMune Inc. is to develop the next generation of Actimmune (interferon gamma-1b), InterMune¿s lead product. Also, just over a year ago, Maxygen entered a research agreement for a protein drug against central nervous system diseases including multiple sclerosis with H. Lundbeck A/S, of Copenhagen, Denmark, which licensed rights. Maxygen kept rights for neurological indications in key Asian markets and global rights for all indications outside of central nervous system diseases, including inflammatory diseases and cancer. (See BioWorld Today, Sept. 6, 2001.)

¿Those are a little different, in that they in-licensed compounds Maxygen had been working on,¿ Trollope said. ¿Not only did we sign to further improve the compound, but they in-licensed them.¿

For Aventis, Maxygen will deploy its MolecularBreeding directed molecular evolution technologies, which it said ¿are ideally suited to improve vaccine products in key ways, including improving immunogenicity, purity and manufacturability.¿ Trollope noted Maxygen already has vaccines for cancer, HIV and hepatitis in early stages.

In other Maxygen news, the company¿s dispute with Enchira Biotechnology Corp., of The Woodlands, Texas, over high-throughput recombination and screening technology, was settled by an arbitrator¿s final ruling.

Maxygen had claimed Enchira was using the former¿s gene-shuffling technology. The arbitrator disagreed with that ¿broad¿ interpretation, Enchira said, but at the same time barred Enchira from using its RACHITT (or, ¿random chimeragenesis on transient templates¿) system, which was the basis of the contract dispute with Maxygen when the firms collaborated in December 1997. (See BioWorld Today, Sept. 13, 2000.)

Maxygen said Enchira could not use RACHITT technology until 2017. It also said Enchira must reimburse Maxygen attorney fees and arbitration costs.

Enchira, which is working on cancer therapeutics, said RACHITT is outdated anyway, and the company is using better methods now. Trollope said the case is ¿over terms of the arbitrator saying they¿ve breached the agreement, and they¿re not entitled to use the technology.¿ But, she said, the arbitrator also forbade using technology derived from RACHITT, and the methods being used by Enchira have not been publicly described.

Enchira also must terminate its license agreement for RACHITT with Genencor International Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., and return a $550,000 fee.

Enchira¿s shares (NASDAQ:ENBC) closed Monday at 54 cents, up 1 cent. Maxygen¿s stock (NASDAQ:MAXY) ended the day at $14.95, up 7 cents.