Merck Serono Chooses Genedata Biologics to Streamline Antibody Discovery Processes

Genedata has announced that Merck Serono, the biopharma business of Merck, Darmstadt, Germany, has adopted Genedata Biologics™ as their central workflow platform at biopharma R&D units, which include R&D sites in Germany, Israel, and the US, where the company is called EMD Serono. Using Genedata Biologics, Merck Serono will streamline its large-molecule research processes to increase both productivity and quality.

"We thoroughly surveyed the market and selected what we think is the leading antibody R&D workflow platform," said Dr. Bjoern Hock, Director, Global Head Protein Engineering and Antibody Technologies at Merck Serono. "The platform will help to increase Merck Serono's throughput in antibody screening, engineering, and expression. Genedata Biologics will be our central repository for mission-critical data on therapeutic candidates such as bioactivity, developability, and manufacturability, and will enable transparent decision-making on candidates to move forward with."

The platform addresses Merck Serono's proprietary workflows and technologies, such as their high-throughput B-cell screening platform, protein engineering workflows for novel next-generation antibody formats, and novel library technologies.

The system will be deployed across different biopharma research centers and will harmonize all biologics discovery processes, including molecular biology, expression, purification, and analytics processes. It will be fully integrated into Merck Serono's IT landscape and laboratory infrastructure.

"We are rapidly expanding our biotherapeutic R&D activities and needed a scalable, flexible platform that we could quickly and easily implement. We chose Genedata Biologics as it is the only out-of-the-box platform on the market dedicated to large-molecule R&D," said Dr. Veit Ulshöfer, Director, Global Head of Research and Bioinformatics at Merck. "Genedata Biologics will serve as our central system for registering, processing, interpreting, and sharing all our large-molecule data."

"We are very pleased that Merck Serono, a major player in developing innovative protein therapeutics, has decided to implement Genedata Biologics as their corporate infrastructure for large-molecule research," said Dr. Othmar Pfannes, CEO of Genedata. "This new collaboration validates our strategy of offering a complete enterprise product platform tailored for biopharma R&D. Our platform reduces costs, increases research efficiency, and provides a clear path for adopting new processes in this quickly evolving field, while keeping IT costs under control and deployment times at a minimum. We are committed to further expanding the platform in close collaboration with our rapidly growing customer base to support new workflows and applications."

In the four short years since its first release in 2011, Genedata Biologics has been rapidly adopted by almost half of the world's leading biopharmaceutical companies. Genedata's collaborations range from single group installations to large, global, multi-site partnerships and include technology transfer, customizations, project management, training, and roll out and deployment support.