Oryzon Licenses Human Antibody Phage Display Technology for Discovery of Novel Therapeutics
This Agreement grants Oryzon a non-exclusive license to use Dyax’s human antibody libraries to discover antibodies and the right to commercially develop such antibody products.
Oryzon is one of the biggest Biotechs in Spain and the leading biomarker discovery Biotech. Oryzon’s ability to discover and validate novel targets in oncology and CNS (neurodegenerative disorders) has produced in the last years a number of therapeutic programs as evidenced by its pipeline of products of small molecules and monoclonal antibodies. Oryzon has been the co-leader of the biggest oncology consortium in Spain. Additionally, Oryzon has several proprietary cancer discovery programs and has a long track record of collaborative research with some of the most important hospitals and Universities in USA, Europe and Spain. Therapeutic antibody products are a major success story in the treatment of cancer and other diseases, with these approaches receiving increasing attention by the pharmaceutical industry over the last years.
Under this agreement with Oryzon, Dyax Corp. will receive an undisclosed upfront fee and development milestones as well as royalties and sales milestones for each antibody product commercialized by Oryzon using Dyax’s technology. Dyax will also receive a percent of Oryzon’s sublicensing income if Oryzon licenses one of these antibody products to a third party.
Carlos Buesa CEO and Chairman of ORYZON has declared “Oryzon, with its multilayered genomic, proteomic and bioinformatic platform, is a leader in the discovery of novel targets and has a rich and challenging program to develop innovative therapies. This agreement allows us to use Dyax’s phage display technology, a well validated drug discovery platform. Our partnership with Dyax is a fundamental step to position Oryzon definitively in the therapeutic monoclonal antibody arena with the best partner.” With this agreement Oryzon becomes the first Spanish Biopharma company committed to developing therapeutic antibody products. The company is focusing its efforts in prostate, endometrial, stomach and lung cancer.
About ORYZON target discovery platform
Oryzon has one of the most complete technological platforms in Europe allowing to translation of basic discovery research with patient sample to identification of pharmaceutical leads or therapeutic antibodies. With a strong core in Functional Genomics / Proteomics / Bioinformatics, we design specific microarrays for specific biomarker/target discovery programs. ORYZON has developed proprietary software both for the design of high-specificity DNA probes (TethysTM) and for the processing and interpretation of the data results (Polyphemous TM), and has also adapted its platform for antibody and protein arrays.
The Validation Platform includes proteomic confirmation with Flexarray from Scienion, Biacore Flexchip and other technologies, in vitro confirmation with RNAi technology and different in-vitro and in vivo models. The therapeutic platform with The Structural Genomics Platform is based on our superior capabilities with fragment based approach (NMR and X-Ray Crystallography) combined with medicinal chemistry and computational methods for the identification and optimization of novel chemical series. Now this platform is also completed with Phage Display technology.
About ORYZON
Oryzon was founded in 2000 as a spin-off of the University of Barcelona and CSIC. Today, with an international interdisciplinary team of 70 employees, Oryzon is recognized as the leading biomarker discovery company in Spain. Oryzon has a complementary diagnostic and therapeutic pipeline focusing on oncology and neurodegeneration. After a successful B series funding in 2008, the company acquired Crystax Biopharmaceuticals, gaining fragment screening, crystallography and structural genomic expertise. Our biomarker programs has successfully resulted not only in the identification of a new molecular signature useful for the early diagnosis of endometrial cancer (which is now being validated in a clinical trial with 500 patients recruited from 14 hospitals) but also in the characterization of new druggable targets for several oncological and neurological diseases.
We have a fast moving dynamic chemistry program with +30 chemists and biologists focused on the three major small molecule programs of the company using a powerful combination of our state of the art fragment screening and molecular modeling technology, along with traditional SAR approaches, to identify new chemical entities having novel mechanisms of action with the potential to be first in class. Oryzon is developing a rich pipeline of targets that we are progressing through preliminary target validation. In addition to our own R&D programs, we are the leading provider of some fee for service capabilities like X-ray crystallography services for structure-based drug design and fragment-based screening services in Spain with collaborations with companies like Almirall, Esteve and others. We plan to extend our partnerships to other pharma companies.