XOMA Announces $6 Million Antibody Discovery Collaboration With Arana Therapeutics
BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 9, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- XOMA Ltd. (Nasdaq:XOMA - News) and Arana Therapeutics Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cephalon, Inc. (Nasdaq:CEPH - News) have entered into a collaboration involving multiple proprietary XOMA antibody research and development technologies, including a new antibody phage display library, and a suite of integrated information and data management systems. Arana has agreed to pay XOMA a fee of $6 million and XOMA will be entitled to milestone payments and royalties on product sales. Under the terms of the collaboration, XOMA will be fully reimbursed for all services it may provide to Arana under the agreement.
"We selected XOMA because of their ability to provide a complete suite of validated technologies that will further enable us to accelerate our antibody development programs toward the clinic," said Steffen Nock, Acting Chief Executive Officer of Arana. "We believe the advantages of these technologies, including XOMA's next-generation antibody libraries, will increase our capacity to cost-effectively develop novel therapeutics."
"We are pleased to partner with Arana, a company with a strong presence and capabilities in the antibody field," said Steven B. Engle, XOMA's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "This monetization of our proprietary technologies and products demonstrates the value of our extensive antibody expertise and increases the return on our research and development efforts."
XOMA has developed integrated capabilities in antibody discovery, engineering and manufacturing, including maintaining the largest collection of commercially available antibody phage display libraries. The company also has expertise in the construction of large, novel and diverse libraries for screening and optimization that enable the selection of antibodies with very specific binding, affinity and potency characteristics to an antigen of choice.
The new, proprietary antibody library covered by the agreement with Arana, recently validated by XOMA, is one of a series of proprietary antibody libraries being developed by XOMA scientists to overcome existing limitations in library design by combining "best-in-class" techniques with XOMA's own proprietary and patent-protected technologies. Access to multiple libraries may offer a number of benefits to XOMA and its partners because it enables the use of libraries best suited to the needs of a particular discovery project. This increases the probability of technical and business success in finding rare and unique functional antibodies directed to targets of interest. |
