Medarex and m-phasys Announce Alliance to Develop Human Antibody Therapeutics
PRINCETON, N.J., and Tubingen, Germany, Nov. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Medarex, Inc. (Nasdaq: MEDX - news) and m-phasys GmbH today announced a collaboration aimed at the joint development and commercialization of fully human antibody therapeutics to G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), a large class of cell membrane receptors believed to play important roles in a number of disease pathways.
The two companies intend to employ m-phasys' proprietary M-FOLD® refolding technology to produce functional GPCRs. Medarex plans to generate fully human antibodies to these GPCRs using its UltiMAb Human Antibody Development System(SM). The companies expect to jointly develop any antibody therapeutics generated from the alliance and plan to share costs and commercialization rights to these products.
``The alliance with Medarex is an important step in leveraging our M-FOLD® platform technology,'' said Dr. Hans Kiefer, Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of m-phasys. ``In addition to our existing alliances, we see a strong need for antibody therapeutics for several indications. We chose Medarex as our antibody partner because of their in-depth scientific and business experience.''
``We are pleased to be working with m-phasys,'' said Donald L. Drakeman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Medarex. ``We believe that their unique protein folding technology will help in accelerating the discovery and development of fully human antibody products.''
The vision of m-phasys is to become a leading company in membrane protein drug discovery. Membrane proteins are thought to represent important targets in human therapy and in crop science. m-phasys' proprietary M-FOLD® refolding technology is capable of producing large amounts of purified and fully functional membrane proteins from recombinant bacteria. To date, the technology has been applied to G protein-coupled receptor and ion channel drug targets. m-phasys is using the proteins as tools for the discovery of innovative therapeutics, with membrane protein structure elucidation as its most important project. In addition, m-phasys has built a ``Compound Generation Network'' of biotech companies with complementary technologies to generate lead compounds targeting membrane proteins. m-phasys was founded in August 1999 by Dr. Hans Kiefer, Dr. Wolfgang Arndt and Marc Lohrmann and is located in Tubingen, Germany. For more information about m-phasys, visit its website at m-phasys.com ... |
