Affimed and Dyax Cross-License Antibody Technologies
HEIDELBERG, Germany and CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 12, 2003--Affimed Therapeutics AG and Dyax Corp. (Nasdaq: DYAX - News) announced today that they have entered into a cross-licensing agreement for phage display technologies. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The Affimed licensed patents consist of two issued U.S. patents with broad claims. They cover the generation of human antibody libraries derived from the IgM repertoire of the immune system, which is considered to be the most diverse naturally occurring repertoire of antibody genes, and the generation of synthetic antibody libraries.
Dyax's Ladner patents have the earliest priority date for phage display patents in the United States and are the core patents in phage display technology. With four granted patents in the United States, Dyax has over 60 licensees to the Ladner patents, making this patent licensing program one of the most widely licensed in the biotechnology industry. The Ladner patents cover the practice of display technologies, including the display of antibodies, peptides, and proteins on any cell, spore, or virus, including bacteriophage.
Peter Fuhge, CEO of Affimed Therapeutics AG, commented: "The cross-licensing agreement with Dyax significantly strengthens our proprietary technology platform for developing therapeutic products using our high quality antibody libraries. This represents another important step on the way to becoming a complete antibody technology company."
"Natural diversity from the IgM repertoire has important advantages over purely synthetic diversity or other natural antibody repertoires," said Henry E. Blair, Chairman and CEO of Dyax Corp. "This agreement is an extension of our strategy to bring a broader intellectual property base and improved technology to both our customers and our internal Dyax antibody development programs."
Affimed Therapuetics AG
Affimed is a product-oriented biotechnology company positioned in one of the fastest growing segments in the pharmaceutical industry - the market for monoclonal antibodies. The company was founded through a spin-off from the renowned German Cancer Research Center and is considered to be one of the few antibody companies that from the start of its existence has pursued a focused strategy to develop an in-house pipeline of promising human therapeutic proprietary antibody technologies supported by competencies in the screening and engineering of fully human antibodies. To date, Affimed is the only antibody player that has developed two large and quite different human antibody libraries, one is naive derived from the IgM antibody repertoire and the other is fully synthetic. Affimed's strategy is to utilize both antibody libraries to ensure a high diversity and a higher probability in the isolation of very specific human antibodies against any target. The quality of the libraries and Affimed's screening and engineering expertise have been validated through the isolation of antibodies to various complex cell surface molecules. Affimed is, for example, the only firm to have succeeded in isolating antibodies that are specific for only the activated form of the GPIIb/IIIa receptor on the surface of blood platelets, falling within the top-selling indication for thrombosis. The company has also created novel proprietary antibody formats that have enabled the development of highly effective therapeutic approaches. These multivalent molecules have been shown to be particularly effective in recruiting cytotoxic cells of the immune system for the destruction of tumor cells. Antibody product candidates have been developed for the indications oncology, cardiovascular and immunosuppression... |
