Simon Moroney runs an amazing library, although the New Zealand-
born chemical engineer doesn't work with books. As CEO of the
German biotech firm MorphoSys, he is master of an archive, HuCAL
(Human Combinatorial Antibody Library), that consists of some 12
billion human antibodies — the proteins that white blood cells
use to fight disease. It forms the basis for a new type of
medicine targeting autoimmune diseases such as multiple
sclerosis and cancer. Instead of containing complete volumes of
the Y-shaped immunoglobulins, HuCAL has the building blocks — 49
variant basic units that comprise all these proteins — plus the
countless CDRs (Complementarity Determining Regions) that decide
their specificity. Phages, viruses that infect bacteria but are
harmless to humans, taxi the structure to the target, a cancer
cell, say. Once there, it will either dock — a match — or not.
The advantage of this ingenious, Lego-like assembly-kit method:
developers can speedily and systematically match an antibody to
a given antige