MorphoSys Issued US Patent for HuCAL Antibody Library
MARTINSRIED, MUNICH, Germany, Oct. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- MorphoSys AG (Neuer Markt: MOR), the Munich-based biotechnology company, announced today that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has granted the Company a new patent covering its Human Combinatorial Antibody Library (HuCAL®). The U.S. patent (US 6,300,064), entitled ``Protein/(poly)peptide libraries'' covers methods for the construction of synthetic, fully modular human antibody libraries based on in silico consensus sequences. The application on which the patent is based was submitted to the U.S. Patent Office in 1998. A related HuCAL® patent was issued in Australia in the year 2000, and further patent applications are currently pending in Canada, Europe and Japan.
``The HuCAL® patent family sits at the core of our technologies and the grant of this patent significantly strengthens our patent portfolio. Moreover, the speed in which the U.S. patent office granted our patent application points to the clear and undisputed novelty and inventiveness of the HuCAL® technology,'' commented Dr. Thomas von Rueden, Chief Scientific Officer of MorphoSys AG.
Recently another patent was granted to MorphoSys in the U.S. (US 6,294,353), entitled ``Targeted hetero-association of recombinant proteins to multi-functional complexes'', further strengthening MorphoSys' intellectual property portfolio. The patent covers multifunctional protein complexes formed by certain hetero-associating domains.
To-date, MorphoSys has four patents granted and more than 40 applications pending worldwide. The patents and pending applications cover a variety of different technologies, including antibody libraries, screening methods such as the EST and CysDisplay(TM) technologies, certain antibody fragment formats, and specific antibodies.
MorphoSys develops and applies innovative technologies for the production of synthetic antibodies, which accelerate drug discovery and target characterization. Founded in 1992, the Company's proprietary Human Combinatorial Antibody Library (HuCAL®) technology is used by researchers worldwide for human antibody generation. The Company currently has licensing and research collaborations with Bayer AG (Berkeley, California/USA), Biogen Inc. (Cambridge, Massachusetts/USA), Centocor Inc. (Malvern, Pennsylvania/USA), DuPont Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Wilmington, Delaware/USA), Eos Biotechnology Inc. (San Francisco, California/USA), GPC Biotech AG (Munich/Germany), Hoffmann-La Roche AG (Basel/Switzerland), ImmunoGen Inc. (Cambridge, Massachusetts/USA), Millennium Inc. (Cambridge, Mass/USA), Oridis Biomed GmbH (Graz/Austria) and ProChon Biotech Ltd. (Rehovot/Israel). For further information please visit the corporate website at: morphosys.com ... |
