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Our vision: individualize cancer medicine
Antibodies
Multiple formats to provide the best antibody therapeutics for each cancer indication
In the past decades, monoclonal antibodies, or mAbs, have transformed from scientific tools to powerful human therapeutics. As one of the fastest growing classes of drugs, to date, more than 40 mAbs have been approved to treat a variety of diseases including cancer, inflammation, autoimmune diseases and others. In addition, identified antigen binding domains are also fundamental elements for the construction of novel therapeutic formats and formulations, such as CAR-T cells, bispecific therapeutics and targeted nanoparticles.
We have developed and integrated multiple complementary antibody and antibody-mimetic protein technologies into our overall portfolio of treatment approaches
Following the success of immune checkpoint blocking antibodies targeting CTLA-4, PD-1 or PD-L1 in cancer treatment, bispecific antibody formats represent the next generation of emerging immunotherapies with the potential to further improve clinical efficacy. In addition to bispecific T cell engager formats, which redirect T-cell cytotoxicity to malignant cells, bispecific antibodies can be formatted as tumor-targeted immunomodulators and dual immunomodulators. Tumor-targeted immunomodulators direct potent immune costimulation to the tumor-infiltrating immune cells, whereas dual immunomodulators simultaneously address two immunomodulating targets, resulting in blockade of inhibitory targets, depletion of suppressive cells or activation of immune effector cells.
Multiple antibody discovery engines to significantly expand our targeting repertoire and enable rapid and efficient production of new mAb candidates
With the acquisition of MAB Discovery GmbH’s antibody generation unit in 2019, we integrated a unique and proprietary rabbit-based antibody discovery platform that can generate and develop high quality, functional mAbs targeting traditional proteins and receptors as well as a wide variety of more challenging targets. Rabbit monoclonal antibodies are highly diverse and do not require affinity maturation, due to consistently high affinities. The mechanisms of antibody diversification in rabbits allow an easy and quick translation of preclinical data into the clinic with an improved probability of success.
Our HuMab discovery technology focuses on abnormal carbohydrate targets upregulated on solid tumors. Aberrant glycosylation is a common phenotypic change of cancer cells that mainly affects the outer part of glycans. These abnormal carbohydrate structures are known as tumor-associated carbohydrate antigens, or TACAs, and are associated with malignancy grade, invasion, metastasis and poor prognosis. TACAs are considered promising novel targets for therapeutic intervention using, in particular, mAbs or CAR T cells. However, TACAs usually induce only low-affinity humoral immune responses, since carbohydrate moieties do not trigger the necessary T cell responses. Using B cell sorting, hit identification, sequencing, antibody production and high-throughput antibody screening, we are able to select optimal TACA-specific antibodies from multiple clinically confirmed immunotherapy responders. All antibodies emanating from this platform are fully human with no need for additional humanization at minimal risk for immunogenicity.
