Date: 2014-05-28
Type of information: Collaboration agreement
Compound: therapeutic antibodies based on arGEN-X\'s SIMPLE Antibody™ technology
Company: Argen-X (The Netherlands-Belgium) Bayer (Germany)
Therapeutic area: Technology - Services
Type agreement: collaboration
Action mechanism: SIMPLE Antibody™ technology is based upon the immune system of llamas. It exploits their conventional antibody repertoire, completely distinct from their ‘heavy chain only’ antibody repertoire. The variable (V) regions of conventional llama antibodies are naturally encoded by the complete repertoire of V genes found in humans – unlike transgenic mice. While proteins of therapeutic interest are often conserved between human and rodent, they are highly divergent between human and llama. This makes llamas able to mount high affinity antibody responses – often human/mouse crossreactive – against any therapeutic target.
Disease:
Details: * On May 28, 2014, arGEN-X, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on creating and developing differentiated therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of cancer and severe autoimmune diseases, announced the initiation of a collaboration with Bayer Pharma, leveraging arGEN-X\'s SIMPLE Antibody™ technology for the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies. The collaboration centers on a novel approach to addressing complex targets across multiple therapeutic areas that are often intractable by existing antibody platforms. With this collaboration, arGEN-X will apply its SIMPLE Antibody™ technology to multiple targets submitted by Bayer. The parties will work together to validate human antibody leads in disease-relevant models, with Bayer being responsible for further preclinical and clinical development and commercialization of therapeutic antibody products.
Financial terms: Under the terms of the agreement, Bayer will pay arGEN-X an upfront technology access fee, research support and technical success-based milestones. Bayer will also pay clinical, regulatory and product sales-based milestones as antibody programs progress through clinical development and registration.
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