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Morphotek®, Inc. announced today the issuance of United States Patent 6,921,666 covering the regulation of mismatch repair, a powerful process for generating functional diversity in yeast, to yield sibling cells exhibiting desirable phenotypes for target discovery, drug screening and/or product development.
Dr. Nicholas Nicolaides, President and Chief Executive Officer of Morphotek commented, “This patent further extends Morphotek’s competitive advantage in the field of whole cell genome-based evolution for understanding systems biology for target discovery and for product development.”
“The claims in this patent cover the use of different mismatch repair inhibitors for enhancing genome-wide evolution of yeast strains to yield pools of sib cells exhibiting a wide range of traits, such as sublines expressing enhanced levels of a therapeutic biologic for scaleable manufacturing, sublines suitable for generating therapeutic proteins with enhanced activity(ies), as well as strains 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 the 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 using a variety of protein and small chemical inhibitors of the mismatch repair process. To date, Morphotek has formed eight collaborations that implement its proprietary technology for discovery and product development.
Morphotek is a biotechnology company focused on the generation of proprietary organisms for product discovery and development. The Company 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. Morphotek also markets an antibody development platform that employs morphogenics to yield fully human, high affinity monoclonal antibodies from human hybridoma cells that significantly reduces the royalty burdens associated with recombinant technologies. Internally, Morphotek employs its morphogenics technology to develop optimized therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of cancer, inflammatory and infectious diseases. For further information visit www.morphotek.com.
Contact:
Kim Ilgenfritz
Morphotek, Inc.
610-423-6147
info@morphotek.com