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Morphotek Inc. announced today the issuance of United States Patent 6,825,038 covering the regulation of mismatch repair (MMR), a powerful process for generating functional diversity in mammalian cells, to yield sibs exhibiting desirable phenotypes for target discovery, drug screening and/or product development. This enabling technology is important for the rapid and efficient generation of genetically evolved sublines that exhibit desired phenotypes for uncovering genetic pathways associated with disease as well as target discovery and product development.
Dr. Nicholas Nicolaides, President and Chief Executive Officer of Morphotek commented, “This is yet another expansion of our intellectual property and further extends Morphotek's competitive advantage in the field of directed cell-based evolution for understanding systems biology and for product development. The claims in this patent are very broad and cover the genome-wide manipulation of mammalian cells to generate pools of sib cells exhibiting a wide range of traits, such as sublines expressing enhanced levels of a therapeutic biologic for scaleable manufacturing as well as evolution of target cells for developing sublines suitable for drug screening and target discovery,” added Dr. Philip M. Sass, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. The mismatch repair pathway is a highly conserved process that all living organisms use to repair naturally occurring mutations that occur during DNA replication.
Morphotek has developed a broad patent estate that covers regulation of this process in single celled organisms such as bacteria, yeast and mammalian cells as well as in more complex multicellular organisms such as rodents and plants. These patents also cover the use of derived organisms for the generation of a variety of commercially important traits (disease models, gene and pathway discovery, antibody maturation, vaccine development and cell line titer optimization). Morphotek has formed collaborations that implement its proprietary technology for discovery and product development with leading academic and corporate biomedical organizations such as Abgenix, Centocor, The Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, The National Cancer Institute, Novo Nordisk, Protein Design Labs, Tanox, The Wistar Institute, Wyeth and the United States military.
Morphotek is a biotechnology company focused on the generation of proprietary organisms for product discovery and development. Morphotek has a validated and patented platform technology called morphogenics that rapidly enhances the natural process of genetic evolution within a targeted host to yield variants with novel, commercially important output traits. This versatile technology has been successfully applied to microbes, plants, and mammals to yield genetically diverse offspring that are suitable for pharmaceutical and agricultural product development in the areas of antibody and protein therapeutics, high-titer protein manufacturing, and drug target discovery. Internally, Morphotek employs its morphogenics technology to develop optimized therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of cancer, inflammatory and infectious diseases. For further company information visit: http://www.morphotek.com
For Information Contact:
Dr. Philip M. SassExecutive Vice President and Chief Operating OfficerMorphotek, Inc.
Telephone: (610) 423-6106