Morphotek and Lonza have executed a manufacturing services agreement to support the development and manufacturing of a subset of antibodies in Morphotek’s therapeutic antibody pipeline. The agreement will reserve capacity for commercial manufacturing of Morphotek’s lead compound farletuzumab (also known as MORAb-003), which recently entered Phase III clinical trials for ovarian cancer under a Special Protocol Assessment (SPA) agreement with the FDA. The collaboration between both parties already encompasses several other monoclonal antibodies currently in clinical or preclinical development.

“Lonza is an ideal partner and collaborator on this project,” said Philip Sass, Ph.D., executive vice president and chief operating officer of Morphotek. “They have a great deal of experience and expertise with large scale expression and purification of commercial antibody products. They have demonstrated their ability to develop high-quality material and documentation with several of our programs and serve as an extension of our development team at Morphotek. Based on our working experience, we are confident that Lonza will meet our production, quality goals and timelines for our antibody programs.”

“Lonza is excited to participate in supporting the commercial manufacturing of Morphotek’s lead compound, farletuzumab,” said Stephan Kutzer, head of Lonza Biopharmaceuticals. “Lonza looks forward to continuing and expanding the Morphotek relationship for both development and manufacturing services using Lonza’s proprietary GS Gene Expression System toward their pipeline of promising compounds.”

Through the use of its proprietary Morphodoma technology, Morphotek develops optimized antibodies, including antibodies optimized for affinity and/or titer, for therapeutic applications and high-titer manufacturing cell lines. The antibodies within the company’s pipeline are targeted against antigens licensed from its collaborative partners.