MorphoSys Expands Target Discovery Capability in Oridis Biomed Collaboration

27-09-2001: MorphoSys AG (Neuer Markt: MOR), the German biotechnology company, announced today an Agreement with Oridis Biomed Forschungs- und Entwicklungs GmbH, Graz, Austria, that will provide MorphoSys with preferred access to one of the world’s largest human tissue banks. The goal of the collaboration is the characterization and validation of new therapeutic targets. MorphoSys will apply its HuCAL® technology to make antibodies to candidate targets, which Oridis Biomed will use to carry out high throughput protein expression analysis on a range of human tissues. Oridis Biomed receives a license to the MorphoSys HuCAL® technology, and will have access to certain antibodies from MorphoSys. MorphoSys receives a first right of negotiation to all antibody products resulting from the collaboration. No financial terms were disclosed.

"This collaboration is of significant strategic importance to MorphoSys", commented Dr. Thomas von Rueden, Chief Scientific Officer, MorphoSys AG. "Oridis Biomed’s access to one of the largest collections of human tissues, coupled with their expertise in protein expression analysis is complementary to our high throughput antibody generation capability. We anticipate the collaboration will help lead us to a number of new starting points for our own proprietary HuCAL®-based product-pipeline."

"By combining with MorphoSys’ technology, we now intend to apply the full potential of our tissue banks towards developing new medicines for diseases for which the current treatments are insufficient or for which there are no treatments at all," explains Professor Dr. Kurt Zatloukal, Chairman of the Board at Oridis Biomed.

The tissue collection resides at the Institute of Pathology, University of Graz, Austria. With 1.4 million paraffin-embedded and 18,000 frozen human tissue samples, the collection is one of the largest in the world. Under an agreement with the Institute, Oridis Biomed has exclusive rights to exploit the collection for commercial purposes. The collection contains a large number of annotated healthy and diseased tissues, and is expected to be exploited by Oridis Biomed to map and quantify the occurrence of potential therapeutic targets.