This is the second such peptide discovery collaboration between the two companies. EPIX recently advanced a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) agent, which incorporates a Dyax identified peptide, into Phase I clinical development for its potential to improve the detection of arterial and venous blood clots.
Under this new agreement EPIX may develop and commercialize the therapeutic or diagnostic products, based on the peptides that Dyax identifies. EPIX is funding Dyax to perform its portion of the research and will pay development milestone and royalty payments to Dyax if successful.
Dyax has a number of small, disulfide-constrained cyclic peptide libraries. The peptides within the cyclic structure range in size from six to 12 amino acids. The number of distinct peptide structures in each library typically exceeds 1 billion. In total, these libraries contain about 10 billion distinct peptides.
"This new collaboration proves that we are satisfied with the technology and find it to be a very effective tool," says a spokesperson for EPIX.
Besides its structured and linear peptide libraries, Dyax also builds phage libraries for protein structures and human antibodies. In another research collaboration with Biogen Idec Inc., also Cambridge, announced recently, Dyax will provide the company access to their fully human antibody libraries for identification and characterization of therapeutic and/or diagnostic antibodies against up to 30 Biogen Idec protein targets in the areas of neurology, oncology, and immunology per year.
Dyax's human antibody phage libraries combine gene fragments from human donors with synthetic DNA. The current generation phagemid-based Fab (Fragment antigen binding) library displays 35 billion distinct human antibodies and the phage-based Fab library displays 10 billion.
By Elizabeth Tolchin
