Antibodies by Design, a division of MorphoSys, Munich, and Chimera Biotec have announced the start of a co-marketing agreement between the two companies
Within the scope of the agreement the parties agree to co-market the rapid generation of monoclonal antibodies by Antibodies by Design and Chimera Biotec's complementary Imperacer assay technology for ultra-sensitive antigen detection.
Each partner will offer the services of the other to its customers throughout the world-wide market.
The Imperacer technology combines the advantages of flexible and robust protein detection through Elisa with the exponential signal amplification typical for PCR.
Imperacer uses antibody-DNA conjugates as a substitute for the antibody-enzyme conjugate used in Elisa.
Amplifying the conjugated marker-DNA typically results in a 100-10,000-fold increase in sensitivity over enzyme-linked assays.
Imperacer is currently used in human and veterinary diagnostics, bio-pharmaceutical research, biological defense, and in the food, beverage, and cosmetics industries.
It is used for a wide variety of highly sensitive analytic applications such as HIV and hepatitis B detection, prion analysis, pharmacokinetic studies, detection of toxins in food and beverages, and quality assurance for cosmetics.
Antibodies by Design uses Hucal Gold, a proprietary recombinant antibody library technology to select antibodies against any given antigen in record time.
The process is performed entirely in vitro, and no laboratory animals are involved.
Pre-adsorption and intelligent counter-screening during the antibody generation process is used to drive the selection towards the unique epitopes on the antigen.
This allows the selection and purification of highly specific antibodies in just eight weeks.
Rapid monoclonal antibody generation service using Hucal Gold is offered worldwide to researchers both from academia and industry.
"We are very glad to gain access to Chimera Biotec's innovative technology platform and to have the possibility to offer an additional highly sensitive antigen detection system to our customers," stated Dieter Lingelbach, head of the Antibodies by Design division and senior vice president of MorphoSys.
"Since the availability of sufficient amounts of antigen material for reliable detection is sometimes a crucial problem for researchers, the combination of highly specific antibodies sourced from the MorphoSys Hucal Gold antibody library with Chimera Biotec's Imperacer approach could be a very attractive detection option".
"The high sensitivity of the Imperacer system demands highly specific antibodies to be effective, and many of our customers are seeking such antibodies for these assays," commented Jan Detmers, business development manager of Chimera Biotec.
"We believe that the Antibodies by Design process is ideal for rapidly generating antibodies with the specificity our customers need in order for us to be able to develop the best assay".
Chimera Biotec develops and markets ultra sensitive immunoassays based on the company's proprietary Imperacer technology.
Founded in 2000 Chimera Biotec supplies ultra sensitive assays to more then 10 biopharmaceutical companies in Europe and the USA.
Additionally, Chimera Biotec customises assays for a variety of applications like veterinarian diagnostics, biomarker analytics and for the food, beverage, and cosmetics industries.
Being the only commercial provider of immuno-PCR assays, which are 100-10,000 fold more sensitive than conventional Elisas, Chimera Biotec focuses on ambitious fields like ultra sensitive detection of CNS markers in neurodegenerative diseases, pharmacokinetics, detection of toxins in food and beverage, biomarker analytics, quality assurance in cosmetics, anti doping testing, and many more.
In addition to its services Chimera Biotec offers standard detection reagents and secondary assays being compatible to commercially available Elisa kits.
Antibodies by Design: MorphoSys develops and applies innovative technologies for the production of synthetic antibodies which accelerate drug discovery and target characterisation.
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), Boehringer Ingelheim (Ingelheim, Germany), Bristol-Myers Squibb (New Jersey/USA), Centocor (Malvern, Pennsylvania/USA), GPC Biotech (Munich/Germany), Hoffmann-La Roche (Basel/Switzerland), ImmunoGen (Cambridge, Massachusetts/USA), Merck (New Jersey/USA), Novartis (Basel, Switzerland), Novoplant (Gatersleben, Germany), Pfizer (Delaware/USA), ProChon Biotech (Rehovot/Israel), Schering (Berlin/Germany), Shionogi (Japan), Xoma (Berkeley, California/USA) and others.
Additionally, MorphoSys is active in the antibody research market through its Antibodies by Design business unit.
Antibodies by Design was founded in 2003 for the purpose of exploiting the MorphoSys's non-therapeutic antibody markets.
MorphoSys's activities in the research antibody segment were significantly strengthened through the acquisition of the UK and US-based Biogenesis group in January 2005 and Serotec in 2006.
