MorphoSys AG, a leading biotechnology companies focusing on fully human antibodies, and Lanthio Pharma, a privately held drug discovery company, announced the acquisition of Lanthio Pharma's lanthipeptide technology, which will be used for drug discovery by MorphoSys.
The acquisition was triggered by MorphoSys exercising an option within an ongoing collaboration and option agreement between the two companies. By exercising the option, MorphoSys takes over the lanthipeptide technology and all related intellectual property. Lanthio Pharma will continue to focus on building its portfolio of selected lanthipeptide drugs and will participate financially in MorphoSys's exploitation of the technology. Financial details were not disclosed.
"Lanthipeptides can become a complementary addition to our therapeutic antibody pipeline and will add more diversity to our drug discovery and development approaches," commented Dr. Marlies Sproll, chief scientific officer of MorphoSys AG. "The decision to acquire this technology was made following a feasibility study to establish high quality and diverse lanthipeptide-based libraries. This brings us closer to adding members of this class of stabilized peptides to our drug portfolio."
As part of its innovation capital initiative, MorphoSys entered a collaboration and option agreement with Lanthio Pharma in November 2012, which included an equity investment as part of the company's Series A financing round.
"Today's news marks an important step for our innovation capital initiative. The joint collaboration on a broader lanthipeptide platform has opened up an interesting opportunity to create further value for both MorphoSys and our partner," commented Jens Holstein, chief financial officer of MorphoSys. "We will continue with this initiative and will seek other opportunities to invest and collaborate selectively with start-ups and smaller biotechs."
Dr. Gert Moll, chief scientific officer of Lanthio Pharma commented: "Great synergies between our companies have resulted in a very successful collaboration. We are confident that MorphoSys will be able to further exploit the great potential of our technology platform by bringing more lanthipeptide drugs into the clinic."
Lanthipeptides comprise a novel class of therapeutics with high target selectivity and improved drug-like properties. Lanthio Pharma's approach can be used to identify peptides which are selective for a specific disease target and to stabilize them in their optimal structural conformation for receptor binding. The high specificity can open up new therapeutic applications, potentially providing drugs for indications classically not targeted with antibodies. In addition to intravenous administration, therapeutic plasma levels of lanthipeptides can potentially be achieved via oral, pulmonary or subcutaneous delivery.
MorphoSys developed HuCAL, the most successful antibody library technology in the pharmaceutical industry. By successfully applying this and other patented technologies, MorphoSys has become a leader in the field of therapeutic antibodies, one of the fastest-growing drug classes in human healthcare.
Lanthio Pharma is a privately held drug discovery company that applies its proprietary lanthionine-peptide technology to the discovery of novel peptide therapeutics with longer half-life and high receptor selectivity.