Morphosys AG announced that the US Patent & Trademark Office has granted the company a new patent covering its proprietary Hucal EST technology. The US patent (US 6,653,068) entitled "Generation of Specific Binding Partners to (Poly) Peptides Encoded by Genomic DNA Fragments or ESTs" covers methods for the high-level production of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) as fusion proteins and subsequent generation of Hucal antibodies against these proteins. The application on which the patent was based was submitted to the US Patent Office in 2000. Related patent applications are pending in all major jurisdictions.

In addition, Morphosys has recently received several notifications of allowance for further patent applications in the US, in Australia and in Europe. Those patents provide an extended protection of the Morphosys Hucal technology and enlarge the area of application for the Morphosys technologies.

"The granting of the Hucal EST patent further strengthens our patent portfolio, commented Dr Thomas von Rüden, chief scientific officer at Morphosys AG. "Hucal EST is a unique technology, supporting researchers in the area of target validation and genomics research and we apply this technology in collaborations with several partners including Biogen, Centocor, Oridis Biomed and Schering."

Over the last few years Morphosys has built a strong intellectual property portfolio around its proprietary technology, Hucal (Human Combinatorial Antibody Library). To date, Morphosys has six patents granted and more than 40 applications pending worldwide. The patents and pending applications cover a variety of different technologies, including antibody libraries, screening methods, certain antibody fragment formats and specific antibodies.