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

To: tnsaf who wrote (214)	8/20/2001 9:58:26 AM
From: nigel bates	Respond to of 1022

MARTINSRIED and MUNICH, Germany, Aug. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- MorphoSys AG (Neuer Markt: MOR), the German biotechnology company, announced today that the District Court in Washington, DC issued a preliminary ruling in its favour in the dispute with Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT) concerning the Griffiths patent (U.S. Patent 5,885,793). The ruling followed a March 2001 trial at which the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the validity of the patent or whether MorphoSys infringed it. The preliminary ruling issued on August 17 states that ``MorphoSys should prevail on the issue of infringement'', pending further briefings or proceedings. ``This is very good news for MorphoSys'', stated Dr. Thomas von Rueden, Chief Scientific Officer, MorphoSys AG. ``This preliminary decision is in line with the MorphoSys view that our proprietary HuCAL® technology is independent and distinct from CAT's''. In announcing the ruling, the Court focused on the question of whether the MorphoSys HuCAL® antibody libraries are ``derived from humans''. The Court stated that ``no reasonable jury could find that the HuCAL® library, whose starting point is theoretical analysis of data, is ''derived from a human``. A final decision by the court on non-infringement awaits further briefing from the two parties involved. Such a decision would be independent of any ultimate ruling regarding the patent's validity. 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 (Berkeley, California/USA), Biogen Inc. (Cambridge, Massachusetts/USA), Centocor Inc. (Malvern, Pennsylvania/USA), Chiron Corporation (Emeryville, California/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) and ProChon Biotech Ltd. (Rehovot/Israel). For further information please visit the corporate website at: morphosys.com /