License/Partnership

Merrimack Pharma Hires Codon Devices To Engineer Proteins

Codon Devices, Inc., (founded in 2004 and funded through series B by Alloy Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Tactics II Venture) and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals announced today that they have entered into a research, development and licensing agreement to apply Codon’s proprietary BioLOGIC™ platform to the development of novel therapeutic proteins identified by Merrimack.

Codon will apply its BioLOGIC™ platform to rapidly engineer and optimize therapeutic proteins according to specifications designed by Merrimack. Strait from the PR machine comes this description of BioLOGIC:

“Codon’s BioLOGIC™ platform combines sophisticated computational design algorithms, high quality library construction and a novel protein display system particularly suited for engineering functional properties of large proteins such as antibodies. Merrimack is developing a pipeline of products targeting the therapeutic areas of autoimmune disease and cancer.”

Even with a graduate degree in biomedical engineering, I’m still not sure exactly what that means. Seems like a lot of garbage masquerading as definition. Up until now, Codon has been primarily focused on churning out custom gene fragments and/or genetically customized cells for its customers. This agreement pulls the company in a radically different, yet potentially more lucrative, direction.

Under the terms of the agreement, Codon will receive clinical milestone payments and royalties on net sales that may result from Merrimack’s development and commercialization of any protein product coming out of the collaboration. Other terms were not disclosed.

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