Dendritic Nanotechnologies Picks Up Dendrimer Portfolio From Dow

Dendritic Nanotechnologies (DNT) reports that Dow has licensed its entire dendrimer portfolio to in exchange for a ‘significant’ equity stake (reportedly 31%). Dendrimers are interesting to pharmaceutical companies because of their drug delivery capabilityies. Starpharma, which held a 42% interest in DNT, will make an additional cash equity investment in DNT in exchange for exclusive rights to DNT and former Dow intellectual property for polyvalent, dendrimer-based pharmaceutical applications.

DNT’s portfolio includes more than 30 dendrimer patents and Dow has added 196 patents (41 patent families). Mike Pirc, Dow’s manager of intellectual stated “This move consolidates a great amount of the important intellectual property in the dendrimer field into one company.”

This strikes me as a perfect storm of technology companies coming to gether to advance the technology. Dow develops a pioneering new technology, DNT is an entrepreneurial company with some technology and a link to an end user and Starpharma can bring the technology to market to the benefit of everyone in the chain.