Omeros acquires Patobios GPCR assay technology

The purchase price includes $7.8m of cash and the remaining $3m will be paid in 379,039 shares of Omeros common stock. Omeros has no milestone, royalty or other payment obligations to Patobios.

Omeros paid the cash portion of the purchase price with part of the $20m of funding it received from Vulcan Capital on 21 October 2010.

GPCRs, which mediate key physiological processes in the body, are one of the most valuable families of drug targets.

Omeros has begun screening orphan GPCRs against its small-molecule chemical libraries using its proprietary, high-throughput assay.

Based on the limited screening of libraries to date, Omeros has already identified and confirmed sets of compounds that interact selectively with, and modulate signaling of, three of these orphan receptors linked to cancer (GPR87), obesity (GPR85) and appetite control (GPR101).

Omeros chairman and CEO Gregory Demopulos said that the company has already demonstrated that their assay technology is capable of identifying molecules that interact with, and modulate the signaling of orphan GPCRs.

"Our option agreement with Patobios allowed us to screen only a handful of receptors, which resulted in Omeros successfully unlocking three orphan GPCRs. Now that we have completed the acquisition, we are focused on rapidly screening the 120 remaining human orphan GPCRs," Demopulos said.

"We expect to find functionally active compounds for a significant percentage of these attractive but previously inaccessible receptors, opening them to drug development by the pharmaceutical industry."