West Coast Editor

To zero in on an undisclosed neurological and metabolic disease target chosen by AstraZeneca plc, Dyax Corp. has entered a collaboration and license agreement using its antibody phage display technology with its London-based partner.

Dyax will identify, characterize and optimize antibodies that bind specifically to the target provided by AstraZeneca, which gets the exclusive right to develop and commercialize the antibodies for therapeutic and in vitro diagnostic products.

Jack Morgan, senior vice president of corporate development and business operations at Dyax, said AstraZeneca "will work with us while we discover and optimize antibodies against the target, and then they will do the toxicology testing, prepare the investigational new drug application and move forward in clinical development."

AstraZeneca will fund Dyax's part of the research program, along with making potential milestone payments. If AstraZeneca puts anything on the market from the deal, Dyax would get contingency-based milestones and royalty payments for a specified period of time.

"Even in the discovery phase, this will take a considerable amount of effort, but there isn't any defined time line," Morgan told BioWorld Today. "The intention is to carry it through to getting a successful product, for AstraZeneca to move forward into the clinic."

Morgan said he could not be more specific about the target and characterized the terms as "probably comparable to other reported antibody discovery and optimization deals," such as those by transgenic mouse company Abgenix Inc., of Fremont, Calif. - which also disclosed a collaboration Tuesday (but did not provide terms) with Corvas International Inc., of San Diego, to discover and develop fully human monoclonal antibodies against a pair of antigens from Corvas' collection of membrane-bound serine proteases (see story in this issue).

"It's sort of ironic," Morgan said. "We, too, have a collaboration with Corvas that we announced last fall, to discover antibodies, peptides or proteins as oncology targets against two novel serine proteases."

Dyax also recently restructured its deal with Human Genome Sciences Inc., of Rockville, Md., to give Dyax more access to HGS targets.

With 60 licensees for its phage display patents, Morgan said, "we've continued our broad partnering activities to drive value and funding from that."

Dyax, which went public two years ago with an initial public offering that yielded $60 million, has two protein product candidates in Phase II trials: DX88 for hereditary angioedema, partnered with Genzyme General, of Cambridge, Mass.; and DX890 for cystic fibrosis, partnered with Debiopharm SA, of Lausanne, Switzerland. DX88 also is being studied at the Phase I/II level in cardiopulmonary bypass surgery to reduce blood loss and other side effects.

Dyax's stock (NASDAQ:DYAX) closed Tuesday at $3.85, up 19 cents.