biojuice

The unstoppable trend towards consolidation of protein therapeutic and antibody companies by big pharma continues. Today saw the $325M acquition of privately-held Morphotek of Exton, PA by Eisai of Tokyo. Morphotek uses human B-cell hybridomas to make fully human monoclonals, which they optimize with morphogenics, their technology to create hypermutable hybridoma libraries by disabling DNA mismatch repair processes [pubmed]. Morphotek has a number of antibodies in clinical development, mainly in oncology.

Some other representative transactions in biologics:

• Avidia, by Amgen for ~$290M+ (Sept 2006)
• Abgenix by Amgen for ~$2.2B (Dec 2005)
• Cambridge Antibody Technology by AstraZeneca for £702M (May 2006)
• GlycFi for $400M and AbMaxis for $80M by Merck (May 2006)

Public companies in the biologics space to keep an eye on include:

Seattle Genetics [SGEN], Medarex [MEDX], and Regeneron [REGN]