The company's net profit came in at €0.3 million, compared to a €3.1 million loss recorded in 2003, while revenues climbed 44 per cent to €22 million. Antibodies by Design, which supplies antibodies for pharmaceutical research purposes, brought in €1 million in its debut year.

Looking ahead to 2005, Morphosys said it expects profit to climb to €1 million and sales to reach €30 million, with €25 million of that total coming from therapeutic antibodies and the remainder coming from the Antibodies by Design unit.

Last month, Morphosys announced the acquisition of UK immunological reagent Biogenesis, which took it into the top five of companies supplying research antibodies. It also signed a marketing agreement with GeneFrontier last year to access the Japanese life science market for antibody research reagents and antibody therapeutics.

The company's therapeutics business also had a breakthrough year, crowned by the start of clinical trials of the first of Morphosys' HuCAL antibodies, a lymphoma treatment in development at GPC Biotech called 1D09C3. The HuCAL technology generates libraries of fully human antibodies for drug screening purposes.