Date: 2013-01-14
Type of information: Services contract
Compound: screening services to profile bispecific antibodies
Company: OcellO (The Netherlands) Merus (The Netherlands)
Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology
Type agreement: collaboration
services
Action mechanism:
Disease:
Details: OcellO and Merus have entered into a collaboration under which OcellO will provide screening services to Merus. OcellO will use its 3D cell culture-based screening platform to profile bispecific antibodies designed by Merus for the treatment of cancer. \"This agreement builds on a successful pilot study to test the suitability of the OcellO platform for screening Merus\' therapeutic bispecific antibodies,” said Dr. Leo Price, Chief Scientific Officer at OcellO. “It aims to establish a long-term relationship between OcellO and Merus.”
Merus is building a pipeline of innovative, human bispecific antibodies (Biclonics™) and single cell-derived combinations of antibodies (Oligoclonics®) for cancer therapy. Through the use of a common antibody light chain and CH3 heterodimerization technology, these full-length IgG antibody therapeutics can be robustly produced at high yields from a single clonal manufacturing cell line using standard approaches. Biclonics™ and Oligoclonics® bind to multiple disease-associated targets, such as growth factor receptors expressed by tumor cells. The company has recently selected the bispecific antibody MCLA-117 as lead candidate for clinical studies in patients with acute myeloid leukemia. Merus intends to start phase I clinical trials with MCLA-117 in 2014.
Financial terms: Financial details were not disclosed.
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