Wacker Chemie and MorphoSys have expanded their existing collaboration for the use of Wacker’s Esetec bacterial secretion technology. MorphoSys will now be able to use the technology for the production of antigen material in addition to the production of antibodies in both the early development of therapeutics and the production of diagnostic and research antibodies. The technology, together with MorphoSys’ production platforms, has the potential to offer advantages with the production of novel antigens, which have proven difficult to produce with conventional expression systems.

“The extension of our existing collaboration with MorphoSys underpins the success of our protein production technology Esetec,” said Dr. Thomas Maier, managing director at Wacker Biotech GmbH, Wacker Chemie’s subsidiary for biopharmaceutical custom manufacturing. “Since we introduced this innovation to the biopharmaceutical market we see that more and more companies revisit E. coli as production host to benefit from shorter development timelines,” he added.

“The use of Wacker’s secretion technology for antigen production allows us to approach development programs where the production of the disease-relevant target molecule represents a major challenge. This could offer us and our partners a head-start in therapeutic projects against novel drug targets including bacterial antigens in current and future infectious disease programs,” commented Dr. Marlies Sproll, chief scientific officer at MorphoSys.

Wacker’s Esetec secretion system is based on E. coli and used for the production of proteins including antibody fragments. The specific E. coli strain developed by Wacker is able to secrete recombinant proteins in their native conformation into the culture medium during fermentation, which makes it easier to purify the recombinant products, according to the company.

Wacker and Morphosys first signed an alliance in 2005 for the use of the Wacker secretion technology for the production of antibodies. This agreement was supplemented in 2008 with a formal license to use the technology.