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Biotech / Medical : HuMAB companies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nigel bates who wrote (184)	6/12/2001 7:25:07 AM
From: nigel bates	Respond to of 1022

By Ben Hirschler, European Pharmaceuticals Correspondent LONDON, June 12 (Reuters) - Celltech Group Plc (LSE: CCH.L - news) said on Tuesday it was studying acquisitions in Germany to build up its presence in Europe's largest drug market, ahead of the launch of key new products. Chief Executive Peter Fellner, speaking on the fringes of an ABN AMRO Alfred Berg life sciences conference, said any acquisition was likely to be in the range $50-150 million. This would be well within the reach of Britain's biggest biotechnology company, which has net cash of 95 million pounds and additional facilities of 115 million available. "European companies are not easy to find but we are looking at a number of possibilities. These would be small national companies or individual products...Germany is a particular focus," Fellner said. Celltech, which inherited a cash-generative pharmaceutical business with the acquisition of Medeva a year and half ago, already has operations in the UK, France and Spain. Fellner said it was important to build on this presence in other key markets ahead of the launch of several promising new drugs, including CDP 870, an antibody-based drug for rheumatoid arthritis. Celltech has a co-development and co-promotion deal with Pharmacia Corp for CDP 870, a medicine which analysts believe could generate peak annual worldwide sales of more than $1 billion, following its expected launch in 2004. CDP 870, which works by blocking a chemical known as tumour necrosis factor alpha that is implicated in inflammation, is also being assessed for Crohn's disease, a gastro-intestinal disorder. In addition, Celltech is developing another product, called Humicade, for Crohn's disease which is likely to reach the market before CDP 870. Fellner said Humicade and CDP 870 would to some extent compete with each other but it still made sense to register Humicade in order to build up the franchise. ANTIBODY COMPETITION Celltech is competing in an increasingly crowded space for antibody drugs to treat inflammatory diseases but the UK firm believes it has a distinct cost advantage over competitors. While rivals manufacture whole antibodies in mammalian cell cultures, Celltech grows fragments in bacteria at less than five percent of the cost, Fellner said. Antibodies -- the natural "foot soldiers" of the immune systems -- are seeing growing interest in the pharmaceutical industry and among investors, who have seen strong gains in stock prices of antibody companies in the past two years. John Aston, Finance Director at Cambridge Antibody Technology Plc , which has licensed another arthritis drug called D2E7 to Abbott Laboratories Inc , told the conference that antibody technology was now accepted in the drug industry after earlier setbacks. "In the last 18 months we've had to spend less time beating down doors. There is now a much more general acceptance of antibody technology," he said. Aston said independent research by Fast Forward Research suggested the market for antibody drugs was currently growing by 37 percent a year, well ahead of overall pharmaceutical sales growth of around 10 percent. In the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, development of antibodies as medicines was held back by the fact that initial versions were based on mouse proteins, causing allergic reactions in patients. That problem has been overcome with the development of humanised and, more recently, fully human antibodies...