Acceptys Inc announced the exclusive licensing of an immortal humanized cell line from Columbia University, which will allow the Company to discover and produce fully human monoclonal antibodies and other human proteins for use as therapeutic products to treat infectious and other diseases.

The cell line, MFP-2, was developed by Dr. Ilya Trakht at Columbia University as a humanized immortal cell line for use in the creation of immortal human hybridomas through the fusion of MFP-2 cells with antibody producing human lymphocytes. The antibodies produced by the resulting hybridomas have human composition similar to antibodies taken from human sera, are reproduced in large quantities, and the hybridomas have been stable for over four years.

"Columbia has built a strong relationship with Acceptys, and we are confident that Acceptys will be successful in developing and deploying Dr. Trakht's important and unique cell line for the benefit of medicine and society," said Dr. Michael Cleare, Executive Director of Columbia's technology transfer organization, Science and Technology Ventures (STV).

"This cell line will enable Acceptys to directly isolate and capture antibody producing B-lymphocytes from targeted patient populations (e.g.; virally infected patients). MFP-2 also gives us the dual benefit of being able to efficiently immortalize antigen specific antibody producing human lymphocytes harvested from Acceptys's hu-SCID mouse model of the human immune system after the system is immunized with a selected antigen or pathogen," said Dr. Tony Giordano, CSO of Acceptys. "Because the same human hybridoma system that is used in antibody discovery is also used in antibody production, we can significantly shorten the development time for our therapeutic programs."

Daniel Devine, President and CEO, added, "We are very excited about using the MFP-2 cell line as a fusion partner to effectively capture, characterize and produce large numbers of fully human monoclonal antibodies against many important disease targets, all without compromising the human composition of the product. In addition, we see tremendous opportunities for the use of MFP-2 for the production of other recombinant proteins for use as therapeutics." The Company believes that since the production capabilities and stability of MFP-2 compare favorably to that of existing non-human production systems and cell lines, the potential advantage of producing products with glycosylation patterns similar to that of the native human protein will ultimately lead to the use of MFP-2 as an accepted standard in therapeutic protein production.

As part of its strategy of fully exploiting the potential uses of MFP-2, Acceptys has and plans on continuing to aggressively out-license the MFP-2 cell line to for-profit and not-for profit institutions involved in biopharmaceutical drug discovery and research.