Other
We will, on a selective basis, validate drug targets for corporate and other partners and we also make certain aspects of our technology available for use in public-sector scientific and medical research.Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine. We were awarded $35 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund in July 2005 for the creation of a comprehensive knockout mouse embryonic stem cell library containing 350,000 cell lines. We are creating the library using our proprietary gene trapping technology for the Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine, a non-profit institute that we founded with Texas A&M University and the Texas A&M University System Health Science Center. We are equipping the Institute with the bioinformatics software required for the management and analysis of data relating to the library. Institute researchers will have certain rights to utilize Lexicon's patented gene targeting technologies.
Taconic Farms, Inc. We established a collaboration with Taconic Farms, Inc. in November 2005 for the marketing, distribution and licensing of certain lines of our knockout mice. Under the terms of the collaboration, we are initially making available more than 1,000 distinct lines of knockout mice for the use by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and other researchers. Taconic will provide breeding services and licenses for these lines and will distribute knockout mice to customers. We will receive license fees and royalties from payments received by Taconic from customers obtaining access to such knockout mice.
National Institutes of Health. We were awarded a three-year contract in October 2005 to provide selected knockout mouse lines and related phenotypic data to the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH). These materials are related to genes that we have already knocked out and analyzed. NIH will make these materials available to researchers at academic and other non-profit research institutions, while we retain the sole right to provide these materials to commercial entities. We are entitled to receive staged payments from NIH following delivery and acceptance of the materials.
Target Validation Agreements. We have established target validation agreements with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies under which we generate and, in some cases, analyze knockout mice for genes requested by the collaborator. We receive fees for knockout mice and data under these agreements and, in some cases, these agreements also provide for annual minimum commitments and the potential for royalties on products that the collaborator discovers or develops using our technology.