BioWorld International Correspondent

PARIS - Hybrigenics SA took over the Dutch company Semaia BV, acquiring 100 percent of its stock in an all-share deal.

The president and CEO of Hybrigenics, Donny Strosberg, told BioWorld International that it was a "friendly" takeover and was a "substantial investment" for Paris-based Hybrigenics, although he declined to put a value on it.

Semaia is a drug discovery firm specialized in oncology, while Hybrigenics is a functional proteomics company focusing on cancer, infectious diseases, metabolic disorders and diseases of the central nervous system. The French company hopes that by applying its technology and cancer expertise to Semaia's drug targets, it should accelerate the discovery of compounds to treat colorectal and other cancers, as well as speed up the validation of selected targets.

Strosberg stressed the "extraordinary synergies between the two companies in oncology" and was enthused about the quality of the know-how and intellectual property Hybrigenics had acquired. "Semaia's research activities are both upstream and downstream of ours," he said, since it not only studies the cellular mechanisms of disease and generates drug targets but "also has access to patient populations and laboratory animals. It has a lot of technology we don't have, such as retrovirus insertion and gene knockout."

He added that Semaia also possessed some "very interesting patents," which he said he wanted to own rather than simply license. He also pointed out that Semaia's cellular and molecular biology laboratories are housed in the University of Utrecht and that its research interacts closely with that of the university. Transforming that two-way relationship with academic research into a three-way one would have made it "more difficult," he said.

Semaia, which was founded in October 2000, focuses on signal transduction and is specialized in the discovery and development of low-molecular-weight active substances that regulate defective intracellular signal transduction. Those are processes that play a role in the pathogenesis and development of cancer. It already has discovered a number of novel therapeutic targets in colorectal cancer (Wnt pathway) as well as in other cancers (the Ras-Ras and PKB/AKT pathways).

Hybrigenics plans to evaluate those targets, which include both enzymes and cell surface proteins, for the development of therapeutic antibodies and small-molecule drugs for cancer. The company uses high-throughput protein interaction mapping, cellular functional analysis and small-molecule screening technologies to analyze specific biological complexes and networks of interacting proteins (pathways) from which it selects target proteins. Those then are used to identify small-molecule drug candidates.

Hybrigenics will remain based in Paris, and Strosberg said it would maintain Semaia's existing laboratories in Utrecht. Semaia's CEO, Rian De Jonge, is to become the unified company's executive vice president of research and development, while Semaia's two co-founders, Hans Bos and Hans Clevers, will join its scientific advisory board.