GlaxoSmithKline (LONDON, United Kingdom) announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Domantis Ltd (an early-stage, antibody-based therapeutics company) for US$454 million in cash. Domantis, a privately owned company, will become part of GSK's Biopharmaceuticals Centre of Excellence for Drug Discovery (CEDD) while continuing to operate from laboratories in Cambridge, UK. In addition to preclinical programs for respiratory diseases and cancer, Domantis has several programs geared toward inflammatory disorders and autoimmune diseases with current early-stage molecules including: DOM0100 (anti-TNFRI); DOM0200 (anti-TNF-α); and DOM0400 (anti-IL-1 pathway).

Domantis' technology generates therapeutics, termed domain antibodies (dAbs), based on the smallest functional binding units that correspond to the variable regions of either the heavy (VH) or light (VL) chains of human antibodies. Domantis has a series of large and highly functional libraries of VH and VL dAbs (more than 100 billion different fully human sequences in each library). At 11-13 kDa (approximately one-tenth the size of typical IgG antibodies), dAbs can be easily and inexpensively manufactured; engineered for prolonged half-life; and administered in inhaled, topical, and, potentially, oral formulations as well as by injection and infusion. The Domantis technology also enables dAbs to serve as building blocks for therapeutics simultaneously directed at more than one disease target. In 2006, Domantis won the UK Innovation in Drug Discovery & Development Award sponsored by London First and UK Trade & Investment.

Domantis was cofounded in 2000 by Ian Tomlinson, chief scientific officer (formerly of the UK Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB), and by Sir Gregory Winter, deputy director of both the MRC-LMB and the MRC Centre of Protein Engineering. To date, Domantis has raised a total of $83 million from investors.

—A. Techman

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