Contact | 
Print version | 
PDF version | 
Send article | 
RSS-Feed
Organon and Dyax enter into therapeutic antibody alliance
19 Jul 2007 -
Organon announced that they have entered into an agreement with Dyax Corp. to discover and develop human therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of auto-immune diseases and cancer. Under the terms of the agreement, Dyax will utilize its proprietary phage display technology to identify antibodies directed towards a target identified at Organon's Research Center in Cambridge, MA (USA). Dyax will receive license fees and research funding, as well as milestone payments and royalties on net sales that may result from Organon's clinical development and commercialization of these antibodies. Financial details were not disclosed.
David Nicholson, executive vice-president Research & Development of Organon, commented: "It is our strategy to expand the portfolio of commercially attractive biotech products. Dyax's state-of-the-art phage display technology will help us to strengthen our R&D pipeline of antibody therapies for cancer and auto-immune disorders."
Living organisms, such as viruses, have the ability to display a foreign gene product, or protein, on their surfaces. Based on this ability of organisms to display proteins, Dyax's scientists invented protein phage display, a novel method to individually display up to tens of billions of human antibodies, peptides or small proteins on the surface of a small bacterial virus called a bacteriophage. Using this patented phage display technology, known as phage display, Dyax is able to produce and search through large collections, also referred to as libraries, of antibodies, small proteins or peptides to rapidly identify those compounds that bind with high affinity and high specificity to targets of interest.
Top