German antibody specialist, Morphosys, recorded its first full year of profits in 2004, helped by the first full year of contribution from its “Antibodies by Design” business, which was set up in 2003.
The company’s net profit came in at 0.3 million euros, compared to a 3.1 million euro loss recorded in 2003, while revenues climbed 44% to 22 million euros. Antibodies by Design, which supplies antibodies for pharmaceutical research purposes, brought in 1 million euros in its debut year.
The company’s therapeutics business also had a breakthrough year, crowned by the start of clinical trials of the first of Morphosys’ HuCAL antibodies, a lymphoma treatment in development at GPC Biotech called 1D09C3. The HuCAL technology generates libraries of fully human antibodies for drug screening purposes.
Looking ahead to 2005, Morphosys said it expects profit to climb to 1 million euros and sales to reach 30 million euros, with 25 million euros of that total coming from therapeutic antibodies and the remainder coming from the Antibodies by Design unit.
