Date: 2012-06-12
Type of information: R&D agreement
Compound: new therapeutic antibodies in oncology
Company: BioInvent (Sweden) Cancer Research Technology (UK) Queen Mary, University of London (UK)
Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology
Type agreement: R&D
Action mechanism:
Disease: cancer
Details: BioInvent International and Cancer Research Technology Ltd (CRT), the commercial arm of Cancer Research UK, have entered a collaboration with Queen Mary, University of London, to identify new therapeutic antibodies in oncology. BioInvent and scientists funded by Cancer Research UK at Queen Mary, under the leadership of Dr Thorsten Hagemann, senior research fellow, Cancer Research UK, will jointly be looking for new therapeutic targets by applying BioInvent’s F.I.R.S.T.™ technology, a functional approach to therapeutic antibody discovery. Dr Hagemann and his team will in return provide the collaboration with biological pathways for the development of new oncology therapies. The F.I.R.S.T.™ platform, through its ground-breaking proprietary biopanning technology, enables identification of functionally superior antibodies across multiple targets overexpressed by target cells. This combined target and drug discovery platform utilizes primary cancer patient cells, rather than recombinant proteins, as an antigen source allowing for discovery of novel specificities (receptors and epitopes) and target receptor functions. This screening system is based on BioInvent’s n-CoDeR® library and is a proprietary antibody technology for “fishing” library antibodies targeting surface receptors, “antigens”, which show promising characteristics in primary cancer patient cells. This functional approach to target identification allows for the selection of functionally superior high-affinity antibodies at an early stage in the drug discovery process. F.I.R.S.T.™ is an acronym for Functional Interrogation of Recombinant antibody librarieS for Therapeutic candidates. The n-CoDeR® library contains more than 20 billion (2 x 10¹º) highly diverse, fully human antibody fragments. The agreement gives BioInvent the option to enter into licenses to bring forward drug candidates beyond lead candidate identification in exchange for milestones and royalties to CRT.
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