MorphoSys AG — Regulatory Filings 2002

Jun 19, 2002

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Corporate | 19 June 2002 07:36

MorphoSys AG english

MorphoSys Issued European Patent for HuCAL Antibody Technology Corporate-news announcement sent by DGAP. The sender is solely responsible for the contents of this announcement. ——————————————————————————– MorphoSys Issued European Patent for HuCAL Antibody Technology MorphoSys AG (Neuer Markt: MOR) announced today that the European Patent Office has granted the Company a new patent covering its Human Combinatorial Antibody Library (HuCAL). The European patent (EP 859841), entitled “Protein/(poly)peptide libraries,” covers methods for the construction of synthetic, fully modular human antibody libraries based on consensus sequences. The patent issued from a patent application filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (“PCT”) in 1996. MorphoSys has already obtained U.S. (2001/US 6,300,064) and Australian (2000/AU 725609) patents under the same title. Additional applications, including continuation applications, are currently pending in different countries. Meanwhile, MorphoSys’ intellectual property position was additionally supported by the decision of the European Patent Office to uphold Biosite’s “Dower” patent (EP 0527839). The Dower patent covers methods to display Fab fragments using phage display technology and MorphoSys received a license for the Dower patent from Biosite in January 2000. The patent had been opposed by Cambridge Antibody Technology and BioInvent Therapeutic AB. The European Patent Office rejected CAT’s opposition on June 12, 2002. “This third granted patent on HuCAL further advances and provides additional confirmation of our clear intellectual property position with regard to our antibody library technology”, commented Dr. Thomas von Rueden, Chief Scientific Officer of MorphoSys. To date, MorphoSys has five granted patents and more than 40 applications pending worldwide. The patents and pending applications cover a variety of different technologies, including antibody libraries, screening methods such as the EST and CysDisplayTM technologies, certain antibody fragment formats, and specific antibodies. end of message, (c)DGAP 19.06.2002