Codexis Will Acquire Jülich Fine Chemicals

Codexis has acquired Germany's Jlich Fine Chemicals in a bid to expand its customer base and geographic reach.

Codexis, partially spun off from the biotechnology firm Maxygen in 2002, applies a microbe engineering technique called DNA shuffling to the fermentation and enzymatic production of pharmaceutical chemicals. The Redwood City, Calif., firm has production improvement agreements with companies such as Eli Lilly, DSM, and Novartis, and last year it signed a $10 million deal with Pfizer.

Jülich sells off-the-shelf enzymes and chiral intermediates and offers R&D services in biocatalysis. Codexis CEO Alan Shaw says Jlich will provide a base of operations in Europe as well as a vehicle for selling novel enzymes that Codexis has developed but never marketed.

According to Shaw, the deal is part of a larger plan to create what he calls "the superpower in biocatalysis." Codexis' early customers sought to lower the cost of making already-marketed pharmaceuticals. The Pfizer deal extended Codexis' technology to unapproved drugs, and now Jlich will provide contact with researchers in the earliest phases of process development, Shaw says.

Codexis posted a $7.0 million loss in 2003, the last year for which figures are available, on sales of $8.4 million. Shaw anticipates considerable growth in 2005 and says he hopes to launch an initial public offering of stock in the next two to three years. "Our ambition is to make shuffling technology a standard operating system in pharmaceutical chemical process development," he says.