Daiichi In Antibody Deal With Morphosys

Daiichi Sankyo has signed on to use MorphoSys’ technology for discovering drugs that treat infectious diseases. Both companies will use MorphoSys’ human combinatorial antibody library, based on the genetic information of roughly 45 billion antibodies, to find potential treatments for hospital-acquired infections. Daiichi will pay undisclosed licensing fees and provide R&D funding, on top of milestone payments and royalties on any drugs that come out of the pact. With many of its competitors having been acquired in recent years by big pharma firms, Germany’s MorphoSys is one of the few antibody technology service providers on the market today.