STORY UPDATE
FRANKFURT, Germany—August 4, 2006—Just weeks after realigning its antibody business under the banner of AbD Serotec, MorphoSys announced the opening of division offices in the Research Triangle Region near Raleigh, N.C. The new facility will provide additional space—more than 5500 ft2—for new staff, an expanded product portfolio, and expanded custom monoclonal antibodies sales.
"The U.S. is the world's largest market for antibodies as research tools which we offer through our business unit AbD Serotec," says Dr. Simon Moroney, MorphoSys CEO. "The Research Triangle Region offers an excellent infrastructure and a significant concentration of life science companies plus first-class research institutes and universities."
FRANKFURT, Germany—After spending the past 18 months broadening its offerings in the research antibodies area, notably with the acquisition of U.S.-based Biogenesis in early 2005 and the buyout earlier this year of U.K.-based Serotec, MorphoSys AG has re-branded its entire antibody line under the AbD Serotec name.
The re-branding effort will make its debut at the Drug Discovery Technology and Development World Congress in Boston next month and was done primarily to remove confusion in the marketplace for the company's antibodies which also included MorphoSys' original line Antibodies by Design.
"It was confusing enough with Antibodies by Design and Biogenesis, especially for customers who were buying both lines," says Simon Moroney, CEO of MorphoSys. "Then with the addi tion of Serotec we felt it was really time to unite all the antibodies under a single name."
The name AbD Serotec was chosen for a few different reasons, according to Joanne Crowe, marketing director for the antibodies lines at MorphoSys. "First, we wanted to keep the name Serotec, since the acquisition was recent and it has a very well recognized brand name. We also wanted to use AbD since it so strongly connected with Antibodies by Design," she says.
Antibodies by Design is known as a custom antibody design company, a market it entered in 2003. To date, the company has generated more than 4,000 antibodies for roughly 800 different research projects which it generates using its HuCal Gold library. Both Biogenesis and Serotec sold antibodies from their catalogs that contained between 4,000 and 6,000 antibodies each.
While Moroney says the research antibodies division of MorphoSys isn't necessarily one of the largest players in the market, the acquired companies, plus the reputation developed by Antibodies by Design over the past three years have provided a strong position for future growth.
