Option secured for stake in US research start-up

Biocon open to acquisitions abroad

Biocon Limited has firmly decided to go the partnership way to keep its "discovery pipeline" going, the company's chairman and managing director Kiran Mazumdar Shaw told reporters here on Wednesday.

Research on the medicinal chemistry front was lacking in the country and partnerships with companies in the US or Europe with promising leads and technologies, were the way to go.

On Wednesday, Biocon announced that it had made an investment in Vaccinex, a Rochester, New York-based firm in the United States, which "has a technology platform to identify if an antibody is a potential candidate to be used as treatment for a particular disease," Shrikumar Suryanarayan, Biocon's president of research and development said.

With Vaccinex's technology, Biocon aimed to identify and develop antibodies, which form a body's defence mechanism, that were least likely to be rejected by the human body or cause allergenic reactions, Suryanarayan added.

"It is through partnerships with such firms that have an early lead or significant technology that Biocon will take on the global market," Shaw said.

Vaccinex is a small start up spun out of the University of Rochester. Since 1997, when it was started, the firm has raised some $25 million with which it has established itself with a staff of 40, half of whom were top notch scientists, says Raymond E Watkins, the company vice president of operations.

"We have a services model where we take contracts from large pharmaceutical companies for anti-body discovery, the revenue from which we use to drive our primary vision of building products."

Biocon was the company's first significant partnership to help scale potential products to the volumes required, says Watkins. Mazumdar Shaw added, the antibodies market was estimated at some $13 billion, but products were not expected at least until 2008.

However, Biocon remains confident of the prospects of the partnership: "We have an option to take a (equity) stake in Vaccinex," Shaw said. The company was open to acquiring small research-based firms in the US or Europe if such an opportunity presented itself.

The company didn't have any immediate plans or candidates for such an acquisition, she said.

Biocon has already a partnership going with CIMAB, a Cuban research firm, that has developed a monoclonal antibody which held the promise of therapy for people suffering from head and neck cancer.

Biocon was also investing between 10 per cent and 15 per cent on in-house research, Shaw said.