Staff Writer

Privately held BioRexis Pharmaceutical Corp. is set to become a subsidiary of Pfizer Inc., as the pharma giant focuses its investments on biotech products.

Pfizer, of New York, agreed to buy BioRexis, a company founded in 2002 to develop therapeutic proteins and peptides using its fusion technology platform designed to create products with longer half-life and greater efficacy compared to existing peptides.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but BioRexis CEO David King said his company "could not be more excited about it," and is looking forward to "what the Pfizer team can do with our technology."

The acquisition is expected to close in the first or second quarter.

To date, BioRexis's funding has come from venture capital. The King of Prussia, Pa.-based firm raised $8 million in a Series A round in 2002, and, two years later, closed a solid Series B round of $30 million.

With a difficult market and discriminating VCs, "biotechs these days have to make choices about the future," King told BioWorld Today. "We're thrilled this opportunity came up. The fit between Pfizer and BioRexis is just magnificent."

The deal follows close on the heels to the unveiling of Pfizer's strategic shift, which involved a 10 percent work force reduction, including the 20 percent cut to its U.S. sales staff announced in December, as well as the consolidation of some manufacturing operations and the closing of three Michigan-based facilities. Pfizer, instead, will focus on expanding its product development portfolio, a goal that involves a major investment in biotech. (See BioWorld Today, Dec. 4, 2006.)

With the addition of BioRexis, Pfizer would pick up rights to its fusion technology platform, a protein engineering approach that adds the plasma protein transferrin to proteins and peptides to "dramatically extend the half-life" of the drugs, King said. A protein that has a half-life of minutes can be "fused to the non-glycosylated transferrin," which has a half-life of 14 to 17 days. That could mean less frequent dosing for patients.

The technology also is used to create Trans-bodies, which are designed as alternatives to monoclonal antibodies. Engineered with transferrin, the Trans-bodies act with the same disease-blocking activity but can be produced in a yeast expression system, which is more efficient and less costly than mammalian cell culture systems, King said.

The first program to emerge from the company's technology is a long-acting GLP-1 receptor agonist program for Type II diabetes.

While BioRexis is keeping close to the vest details of its lead drug program, King said both clinical and preclinical studies are ongoing. The company has not yet disclosed any additional targets or indications for other drug candidates in early development.