MorphoSys and Novozymes inked a long-term licensing and technology-transfer agreement that gives the latter access to MorphoSys’s Slonomics® platform for use in the development of industrial biotech products. The deal is the first for the Slonomics technology within the industrial biotech sector. MorphoSys itself acquired the platform through its October 2010 acquisition of Sloning BioTechnology. Sloning had previously been providing combinatorial libraries to Novozymes for a number of years.
The Slonomics technology is used to generate diverse SlonoMax® libraries for protein engineering. Unlike traditional methods in which individually designed and synthesized single-stranded oligos are joined together, Slonomics uses a library of pre-made double-stranded triplets that act as universal building blocks for gene syntheses processes, Sloning explains. The triplet library represents all possible sequence combinations necessary to build any desired DNA molecule, and the standardized building blocks can be combined using a series of reaction steps, using a fully automated procedure.
Novozymes claims the technology dramatically shortens its discovery time, and typically reduces the number of variants that need to be made for the development of an enzyme, from millions, to just ten thousand.