Dyax Receives $1.7 Million Industrial Enzyme Grant

Dyax Corp. has received a $1.7 million Advanced Technology Program (ATP) grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop technologies for designing novel enzymes for industrial manufacturing processes. The grant will support development of an advanced form of Dyax's phage display technology, used for rapid production of industrial enzymes with improved catalytic activity and substrate specificity.

"The use of phage display to engineer and produce highly selective industrial enzymes is an exciting new product application for Dyax, and illustrates the broad potential of our proprietary technology platform," said Henry Blair, chairman and CEO of Dyax. "We believe this application will greatly increase the efficiency of chemical process design and development in both the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries, potentially providing a substantial market for new Dyax products. The NIST grant allows us to pursue this important commercial opportunity while continuing to focus on our core business of developing novel therapeutic, diagnostic and separations products based on phage display."

Proceeds of the ATP grant will support development of an enhanced form of phage display for the rapid design and production of highly selective enzymes used to synthesize valuable chemicals and pharmaceuticals. In contrast to traditional methods of enzyme selection and development, which are slow and non-specific, Dyax's proprietary phage display technology uniquely enables the rapid generation of large enzyme libraries containing most of the mutations likely to influence an enzyme's catalytic activity. In addition, phage display further expedites the process of selecting enzymes with optimal substrate specificity and enantioselectivity by allowing for simultaneous testing of multiple enzyme variations.

"Our phage display-based approach to enzyme engineering has the potential to significantly reduce the time needed to discover and develop novel catalysts for large-scale industrial manufacturing," stated Charles R. Wescott, Senior Scientist at Dyax and principle investigator for the enzymology research team. "The ATP project allows us to enhance the supply of cost-effective enzymes for chemical and pharmaceutical industrial processing."

Phage Display

Dyax's patented phage display is a versatile, high-throughput discovery technology with broad applications in the development of new therapeutic, diagnostic and separations products. In a nutshell, the technique permits scientists to rapidly identify compounds that bind to targets of interest. Phage display is faster, more powerful, and less expensive per lead compound discovered than conventional combinatorial and antibody-based approaches.

Phage display selection is made from a diverse set of up to hundreds of millions of proteins displayed on the surface of a bacterial virus, bacteriophage, known commonly as "phage." Dyax's Phage display process consists of:

• generating a large collection of phage, known as a "library," that contains genes encoding up to hundreds of millions of related proteins, or potential binding compounds.
  screening the library by exposing it to a specified target and isolating those phage whose displayed proteins bind to the target

  analyzing the selected binding compounds by sequencing their genes and by producing and characterizing small quantities for relative specificity and affinity to the target.

For more information: Susan Dana Jones, Vice President of Technology, Dyax Corp., 1 Kendall Sq., Bldg. 600, Cambridge, MA 02139. Tel: 617-225-2500, ext. 243. Fax: 617-225-2501.