Medarex of the USA, a specialist in producing fully-human antibodies, has entered into two new agreements aimed at improving the properties of its drug candidates.
In the first deal, the company has licensed rights to a technology developed by BioWa that is designed to increase the ability of its drugs to cause antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC). This improves the cell-killing activity of antibodies and could be used to increase the efficacy of drugs targeted at diseases such as cancer.
BioWa's technology, called Potelligent, could be used to reduce the doses of antibody drugs and so reduce production costs, as well as potentially lowering the risk of side effects, according to Dr Nobuo Hanai, the firm's chief executive.
Potelligent is based on a technology developed by research scientists at Japan's Kyowa Hakko Kogyo, BioWa's parent company. The premise is to reduces the fucose content of an antibody. Fucose-depleted antibodies have demonstrated enhanced ADCC activity by orders of magnitude in laboratory tests, and the first clinical test of such an antibody suggests that other important characteristics of the antibody, such as the pharmacokinetics and immunogenicity, appear unaffected.
Meantime, Medarex has entered into a partnership with fellow US company Diversa that is also aimed at developing antibodies with enhanced functionality.
Through a joint research effort, Diversa and Medarex plan to combine their respective capabilities in directed evolution and antibody biology. The companies are co-sponsoring this project, and they believe it may have broad applicability in the field of therapeutic antibodies.
Diversa's Gene Site Saturation Mutagenesis (GSSM) DirectEvolution technology can generate protein variants incorporating all of the 20 possible amino acids at every position along a protein's sequence and, the company believes, can engineer monoclonal antibodies to achieve optimal binding, specificity and stability.
A second technology, Tunable GeneReassembly, optimises the characteristics of proteins by combining their best properties into a new molecule. These approaches produce a range of different antibody structures that can be used in drug screening.