Diversa Corporation and Medarex Inc have entered into a strategic partnership aimed at developing antibodies with enhanced functionality. Through a joint research effort, Diversa and Medarex plan to combine their respective capabilities in directed evolution and antibody biology. The companies are co-sponsoring this project, and they believe it may have broad applicability in the field of therapeutic antibodies.

"The partnership between Diversa and Medarex will combine complementary technologies with the goal of developing antibodies with superior functionality," said Dr. Donald L. Drakeman, President and CEO of Medarex. "Diversa is a clear leader in the field of directed evolution and protein engineering, and we believe their technologies are a natural fit with our antibody development expertise."

"We are pleased that Medarex, a leader in developing human monoclonal antibody-based therapeutics independently and through its extensive collaborative network, has chosen to partner with Diversa," stated Jay M. Short, President and Chief Executive Officer of Diversa Corporation. "Medarex's preclinical capabilities and expertise in immune cell receptor function are an excellent complement to Diversa's antibody engineering capabilities. We look forward to working with Medarex and its collaborators to accelerate the development of optimized, highly-effective antibody-based drug candidates."

Diversa has developed patented, proprietary DirectEvolution and screening technologies designed to generate new and enhanced protein-based therapeutic agents. Diversa's Gene Site Saturation Mutagenesis (GSSM) DirectEvolution technology is a patented proprietary method that can rapidly generate protein variants incorporating all of the 20 possible amino acids at every position along a protein's sequence. Diversa believes that the GSSM platform is particularly suited to engineer monoclonal antibodies to achieve optimal binding, specificity, and stability. The Tunable GeneReassembly technology is used to optimize characteristics of proteins by combining their best properties into a new, improved molecule. Diversa believes that this next-generation technology significantly increases the probability of finding gene products that may lead to novel and next generation biopharmaceuticals by expanding the genetic diversity available to be screened.