MorphoSys AG has collaborated with privately held Dutch biopharmaceutical company, Lanthio Pharma for its technology LanthioPep which 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. MorphoSys and Lanthio Pharma will jointly apply their respective technologies to establish high quality and diverse lantipeptide-based libraries.

MorphoSys receives preferred rights to exclusively license the LanthioPep technology for drug discovery.

MorphoSys will also make an equity investment in Lanthio Pharma as part of the company's Series A financing round. After closure of the transaction, MorphoSys will have a minority stake in Lanthio Pharma.

"Therapeutic peptides and especially so called stapled or constrained peptides comprise an emerging compound class which offers the potential to address multiple target classes and disease categories currently beyond reach for therapeutic proteins or small molecules. The combination of Lanthio Pharma's platform and our expertise in intelligent library design offers unique opportunities for both companies and that's what got us excited," commented Dr Marlies Sproll, chief scientific officer of MorphoSys AG.

"We are very pleased to have access to this novel technology platform and promising class of therapeutic peptides," commented Jens Holstein, chief financial officer of MorphoSys. "This transaction represents a new approach for MorphoSys providing innovation capital to promising start-ups with technologies and product candidates being close to our core capabilities."

Lanthio Pharma applies its proprietary LanthioPep technology to discover peptide therapeutics with increased resistance to peptidase degradation, high receptor specificity and increased intrinsic activity. The high specificity can open up new therapeutic applications around novel targets including intracellular targets and GPCRs. Therapeutic plasma levels of lantipeptides can potentially be achieved via oral, pulmonary or subcutaneous delivery. The technology includes a proprietary bacterial display capability, which allows for the construction of focused or diversified libraries of lanthionine-peptides. These libraries allow for immediate functional screening and easy production of peptides of interest for further in vivo and in vitro testing. Lanthio Pharma signed a partnering deal for its lead compound PanCyte, a lanthionine-stabilized Angiotensin-(1-7) agonistic peptide for the treatment of pulmonary indications, with US-based Tarix Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in 2012. The start of clinical development of PanCyte is expected in 2013.

"Peptides are an attractive class of drugs, because they are used by the body itself to regulate physiological processes. A drawback of using peptides therapeutically can be their ability to interact with several receptors and their rapid degradation by peptidases in the body. Lanthio Pharma's technology can make peptides more receptor specific and the introduction of lanthionines also provides strong protection against peptidase degradation. As such, our lantipeptides typically have better "drug-like" properties, compared to natural linear peptides. In combination with MorphoSys's outstanding capabilities in generating high-quality protein libraries we are confident that we can bring lantipeptides to the next level," commented Bart Wuurman, CEO of Lanthio Pharma.