OGeS and Medarex Sign Therapeutic Antibody Collaboration Agreement in Cancer

Oxford Genome Sciences Ltd "OGeS" and Medarex, Inc. have announced that they have entered into a strategic collaboration to discover and develop human antibody therapeutics for the treatment of cancers, including colorectal cancer.

The collaboration combines OGeS' ability to discover targets for oncology with Medarex's expertise in the development of fully human antibody therapeutics.

The collaboration provides for OGeS and Medarex to discover, develop and commercialize therapeutic antibodies on a 50:50 basis.

During the initial phase of the collaboration, OGeS intends to provide novel colorectal cancer targets, against which Medarex expects to generate fully human monoclonal antibodies using its proprietary UltiMAb Human Antibody Development System^®.

OGeS plans to utilize its Oxford Genome Anatomy Project (OGAP^®) database, databases that integrates genomic, proteomic and clinical information derived from blood and tissue studies for a large number of diseases from 50 different human tissues and representing 60 diseases.

"I am extremely excited about our partnership with Medarex, a leader in the development of human antibody therapeutics," said Dr. Christian Rohlff, CEO of OGeS.

"Their expertise in combination with the unique targets from our OGAP database give me great confidence that we can develop new and improved treatment options for patients with colorectal cancer."

"We are very happy to have signed this agreement with OGeS and believe that access to the unique high-quality targets from the OGAP database will allow us to quickly identify novel antibody-based targets for cancer," said Donald L. Drakeman, President and CEO of Medarex, Inc.

"We are impressed with the capabilities of OGeS' technology for identifying disease targets and look forward to applying our human antibody and clinical development expertise for the development of new cancer treatments."