Merus and ChromaCon receive a € 1.8 million project grant for the discovery and development of bispecific antibodies for therapy of advanced breast cancer

May 16, 2011

Utrecht, The Netherlands and Zurich, Switzerland, May 16 2011 - Merus BV and ChromaCon AG announced today the award of a EUREKA Eurostars grant with a total budget of €1.8 million to discover and develop bispecific antibodies for treatment of metastatic breast cancer. In this program, Merus will use its humanized mouse platform (MeMo™) to generate therapeutic human monoclonal antibodies that will be expressed as bispecifics from a single cell (Oligoclonics™). ChromaCon will be responsible for establishing a scalable process to purify the bispecific antibodies using its enabling ContiChrom purification platform. It is expected that the resulting lead bispecific antibodies will have superior biological activity and lower toxicity compared to current antibody therapies (e.g. Herceptin) used to treat breast cancer. Mark Throsby, COO of Merus, said: "Once again we are delighted with the recognition and support our technology receives from EUREKA. With this Eurostars subsidy, Merus will be able to further develop its innovative technologies and product pipeline. In particularly this subsidy allows us to strengthen our already successful interaction with ChromaCon to build an industry leading bispecific antibody platform.” “Guido Stroehlein, CEO ChromaCon commented: “Bispecific antibody product development has been severely hampered in the past by the lack of suitable purification technologies. We are glad that we can offer a generic platform that enables the economic development of this product class and we are delighted to collaborate with Merus, a leader in bispecific antibody product technology.” The subsidy is for three years and aims to yield at least one candidate ready to begin clinical development. About Eurostars: The EUREKA initiative enables industry and institutes across Europe and beyond to collaborate in a bottom-up approach to developing and exploiting innovative close-to-market technologies. It has long championed SME participation in European projects, putting them in the driving seat and enabling them to bring innovation to market in a short time. Now the Eurostars Program makes it possible to speed up and harmonize funding for small but ambitious international R&D projects, giving new impetus to research-oriented SMEs. The public funding involved – €300 million from Eurostars-dedicated national budgets, topped up by €100 million from the EU Framework Program – is intended as a bonus to other local support. All participants are treated equally with fully transparent procedures established followed by fast funding availability to the same timetable throughout Europe. About Merus: Merus is a biotechnology company that is applying the MeMo™, Oligoclonics™ bispecific antibody technologies to build a pipeline of innovative human therapeutic antibodies. These technologies result in bispecific antibodies or mixtures of antibodies that can be applied in multiple therapeutic areas including oncology, chronic inflammation, and infectious diseases. Merus aims to demonstrate superior efficacy of these human recombinant antibody-based therapeutics in relevant pre-clinical models and further develop selected product candidates to early clinical testing. About ChromaCon: ChromaCon is a Swiss biopharmaceutical tool company providing enabling purification technologies, equipment and services. Its proprietary Contichrom technology (using the MCSGP principle) is based on continuous chromatography, a powerful tool for the economic purification of components from complex mixtures, enabling the development of previously not accessible novel biological medicines and life cycle products with improved characteristics. For further information please visit our website at www.merus.nl or www.chromacon.ch