First HuCAL-based Diagnostic Kits to Enter Market
MorphoSys AG (FSE: MOR; Prime Standard Segment, TecDAX) today announced that Proteomika S.L., subsidiary of Progenika Group, a Spanish biotechnology company specializing in biomarker discovery, has signed a commercial license agreement for seven diagnostic HuCAL-antibodies from MorphoSys's AbD Serotec Division. To generate these antibodies AbD Serotec applied MorphoSys's HuCAL GOLD and HuCAL PLATINUM antibody technologies. Proteomika will implement these antibodies in their PROMONITOR® kits. AbD Serotec will receive royalties on products sales. Further financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.
PROMONITOR® is a diagnostic test that accurately determines the circulating levels of different drugs and the immune response triggered in the patient by the treatment. PROMONITOR® assures these parameters are measured extremely accurately thus allowing for better clinical management of patients and rational and cost-effective use of biological therapies. Proteomika currently offers products and services for monitoring patients treated with different anti-TNF and anti-CD20 drugs, and is developing similar tests for other biologicals. Proteomika plans to launch HuCAL antibody containing PROMONITOR® kits for use in routine clinical monitoring of biological therapies in the second quarter of 2011.
'Administration of biologic drugs should always be performed in parallel with the close monitoring of the patient response to the drug in order to evaluate the efficacy of treatment and if necessary to adjust dosage or switch therapy,' commented Dr. Daniel Nagore, CSO of Proteomika. 'The use of PROMONITOR® allows individualized optimization of treatment regimes, thereby increasing the clinical benefit to patients and avoiding the waste of time, money and opportunity spent on ineffective treatments.'
'Diagnostic tools play an increasingly important role in the development of new drugs and in many therapy decisions,' commented Dieter Feger, Head of AbD Serotec. 'AbD Serotec is ideally positioned at the nexus of these areas as our antibody platform has the potential to deliver clearly differentiated diagnostic products. We believe that the MorphoSys HuCAL antibody platform can have as big an impact here as it is having in the therapeutic market.'