Date: 2017-01-10
Type of information: Collaboration agreement
Compound: antibody therapeutics
Company: Abbvie (USA - IL) Zebra Biologics (USA - MA)
Therapeutic area: Inflammatory diseases
Type agreement: collaboration
Action mechanism: monoclonal antibody. To date all clinically approved antibody therapeutics exert their effect by blocking (antagonizing) signaling between ligands and receptors or by neutralizing pathogens. Rare antibody molecules may also activate biochemical pathways, although finding such "agonist" antibodies has proven difficult. As demonstrated in key peer-reviewed publications, the recently developed Zebra screening platform opens up a novel biological function-based approach to screening very large combinatorial antibody or other peptidic libraries for potent and highly selective agonist biologic drugs.
Disease:
Details: * On January 10, 2017, Zebra Biologics, an emerging biotechnology company of which OPKO owns approximately 28%, announced it has entered into a collaboration with AbbVie to discover agonist antibody therapeutics for inflammatory diseases. Zebra will use its novel and patented function based antibody discovery platform to generate antibodies that activate biological pathways associated with targets designated by AbbVie. Zebra and AbbVie will collaborate closely on the identification and pre-clinical validation of candidates. AbbVie would then be responsible for clinical development, manufacturing, regulatory approval and world-wide commercialization.
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