MorphoSys moves into synthetic biology with €19M acquisition of Sloning

Acquisition

MorphoSys has acquired the private German company Sloning, a specialist in synthetic biology, building its position in the assembly and quality of protein libraries. By integrating Slonomics into its existing antibody technology platform, MorphoSys says it expects to improve quality of the antibodies it generates, such that one in every two projects started will reach clinical development.

Sloning’s shareholders received a one-off €19 million cash payment upon signing.

“This acquisition secures our position at the forefront of antibody technology,” said Simon Moroney, Chief Executive Officer of MorphoSys AG. “Sloning’s unique technology is the most powerful method available for assembling protein libraries and has been proven to deliver superior products for a range of applications. We plan to use it to generate optimised antibodies much faster than can be done today and also to gain access to antibodies that simply can’t be made with current technologies.”

Sloning’s patented core technology enables the precise construction of protein libraries comprising defined mixtures of amino acids at pre-determined positions with unprecedented speed. This technology opens the way to a new and flexible approach to generating optimized proteins, such as antibodies.

“Current antibody generation technologies use an initial repertoire, which largely determines the properties of the resulting antibody. We intend to use Slonomics as the basis of a fundamentally different approach, which will rapidly test multiple generations of antibodies, equivalent to screening many billions of molecules, to isolate the best possible candidate,” Sproll said. “We expect to shorten the time needed to generate an antibody drug candidate by a third and even more importantly, to increase the proportion of programmes reaching clinical development to 50 per cent.”

Sloning, founded in 2001, is a private company based in Puchheim, near Munich. The major shareholders are HBM BioVentures, KfW, LBBW Venture Capital and Deutsche Effecten- und Wechsel-Beteiligungsgesellschaft.