Arnold & Porter Advises Touchlight on Deal With Ceva Animal Health To Use Touchlight’s dbDNA Technology in Animal Health

Arnold & Porter advised UK company Touchlight on an agreement with Ceva Animal Health Limited to use Touchlight’s dbDNA technology in animal health. Ceva and Touchlight will pursue a broad ranging development program to bring innovative DNA vaccine products to market for animal health. While the financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed, the agreement includes an upfront payment, development milestones, and royalties on sales of commercialized products. The partnership brings together Ceva’s world leading development and commercialization capability with Touchlight's best in class dbDNA technology, which enables rapid high purity enzymatic DNA production and eliminates its antibiotic resistance genes.

Karen Fallen, CEO of Touchlight, said: “We were delighted that Arnold & Porter were able to support us with this complex strategic transaction and this is yet another highly successful collaboration between our teams, with the deep sector-specific experience and legal expertise of the Arnold & Porter team across jurisdictions being key to successfully structuring the transaction and enabling the deployment of our industry-leading dbDNA technology in such a broad ranging programme.”

Arnold & Porter partner Ewan Townsend said: “We have supported the Touchlight team on a variety of transactions for nearly a decade and were delighted to help them in this latest application of their proprietary dbDNA platform.”

Arnold & Porter’s leading Life Sciences Transactions practice specializes in supporting its clients in deals involving cutting-edge science. The team was led by London partners Jeremy Willcocks and Ewan Townsend, senior associates Tom Wilson and Emelia Morris, and included partner John Schmidt, counsel Zeno Frediani, and associates Sam Milucky and Zahrah Kazim.