Medical
businesswire | September 21, 2023
AbCellera announced that it has expanded its existing multi-target collaboration with Regeneron to discover therapeutic antibodies for up to eight targets selected by Regeneron, increased from the original four.
“Having successfully delivered on two challenging discovery campaigns under the original agreement, we are excited to expand the scope of our collaboration with Regeneron to include up to four additional targets,” said Carl Hansen, Ph.D., founder and CEO of AbCellera. “We look forward to using our antibody discovery and development engine to bolster Regeneron’s preclinical portfolio and help identify promising candidates for their programs.”
The collaboration, which began in March 2020, leverages AbCellera’s antibody discovery engine and Regeneron’s VelocImmune® mice to identify novel therapeutic antibodies. AbCellera has initiated programs for all four of the original targets, with Regeneron exercising its rights to advance antibody candidates into further preclinical development for the two programs that have been completed.
Under the terms of the agreement, Regeneron has the right to develop and commercialize therapeutic antibodies resulting from the collaboration. AbCellera receives research payments and is eligible to receive downstream clinical and regulatory milestone payments and royalties on net sales of products.
About AbCellera Biologics Inc.
AbCellera is breaking the barriers of conventional antibody drug discovery to bring better medicines to patients, sooner. AbCellera’s engine integrates expert teams, technology, and facilities with the data science and automation needed to propel antibody-based medicines from target to clinic in nearly every therapeutic area with precision and speed. AbCellera provides innovative biotechs and leading pharmaceutical companies with a competitive advantage that empowers them to move quickly, reduce cost, and tackle the toughest problems in drug development.
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Medical
globenewswire | September 12, 2023
Nurix Therapeutics, Inc. a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing targeted protein modulation drugs designed to treat patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors, today announced that it has entered into a multi-year, multi-target strategic collaboration agreement with Seagen Inc. to advance a new class of medicines called Degrader-Antibody Conjugates (DACs) for use in cancer. The collaboration between the two companies will focus on an innovative approach to combine two powerful technologies to target cancer—antibody-drug conjugation (ADC) and targeted protein degradation (TPD)—with the goal of creating drugs with new mechanisms of action as well as improved specificity and anti-cancer activity.
“By combining the tissue and tumor specificity of antibodies with highly potent and catalytic targeted degradation of cancer driver proteins, we believe that DACs may represent a next generation of cancer medicine for a wide range of solid tumors and hematologic malignancies,” said Arthur T. Sands, M.D., Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of Nurix. “With Seagen, our strategic goal is to advance ADC technology to the next level to provide patients with new DAC drugs that deliver greater anti-tumor efficacy and safety compared to currently available agents.”
“The targeted protein degrader modality provides unique advantages over payloads currently employed across the ADC field,” said Gwenn M. Hansen, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Nurix. “This collaboration is a new application of our DELigase technology, and we are delighted to work with Seagen, a pioneer in the development and commercialization of ADC therapeutics, to create a new generation of drugs to fight cancer.”
Under the terms of the agreement, Nurix will receive an upfront payment of $60 million and has the potential to receive up to approximately $3.4 billion in research, development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments across multiple programs. In addition, Nurix will be eligible for mid-single to low double digit tiered royalties on future sales, and Nurix retains an option for U.S. profit sharing and co-promotion on two products arising from the collaboration. As part of the multi-year collaboration, Nurix will use its proprietary DELigase platform to develop a suite of targeted protein degraders against multiple targets nominated by Seagen that are suitable for antibody conjugation. Seagen will be responsible for conjugating these degraders to antibodies to make DACs and advancing these DAC drug candidates through preclinical and clinical development and commercialization. Given the potential to conjugate multiple antibodies to unique degraders, several DAC drugs may be developed and commercialized within this collaboration.
With the receipt of the $60 million upfront payment, Nurix expects that its existing cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, excluding any future potential milestones from collaborations, will be sufficient to fund its operating activities into the second quarter of 2025.
About Nurix Therapeutics, Inc.
Nurix Therapeutics is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of innovative medicines based on the modulation of cellular protein levels as a novel treatment approach for cancer and other challenging diseases. Leveraging extensive expertise in E3 ligases together with proprietary DNA-encoded libraries, Nurix has built DELigase, an integrated discovery platform, to identify and advance novel drug candidates targeting E3 ligases, a broad class of enzymes that can modulate proteins within the cell. Nurix’s drug discovery approach is to either harness or inhibit the natural function of E3 ligases within the ubiquitin-proteasome system to selectively decrease or increase cellular protein levels. Nurix’s wholly owned, clinical stage pipeline includes targeted protein degraders of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, a B-cell signaling protein, and inhibitors of Casitas B-lineage lymphoma proto-oncogene B, an E3 ligase that regulates activation of multiple immune cell types including T cell and NK cells. Nurix is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
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Medical, Diagnostics
prnewswire | August 28, 2023
Aspen Neuroscience today announced that it is partnering with Emerald Innovations, a pioneer in the creation of "invisible" off-body sensors for measuring health analytics, and Rune Labs, a software and data analytics company for precision neurology, to incorporate digital health (DHT) modalities in the company's Trial-Ready Screening Cohort Study.
The Trial Ready Screening Cohort study was launched in 2022 to screen, enroll and begin manufacturing cells for potential patient candidates for the future Phase 1/2a clinical trial for ANPD001, a personalized (autologous) cell therapy to treat Parkinson's disease (PD) by replacing lost dopamine neurons.
Aspen Neuroscience is advancing the collection of objective measures of motor function via passive in-home monitoring, working with Emerald Innovations' contactless biosensors, and active monitoring, working with Rune Labs' clinical development platform, StriveStudy. The use of DHT empowers trial investigators to include objective, long-term (pre-treatment) motor and sleep symptom capture, to provide data on each patient's rate of disease progression.
"Parkinson's disease is very personal in nature, and we are working to develop a personal cell therapy for PD," said Damien McDevitt, PhD, Aspen president and CEO. "Everyone with Parkinson's has a unique experience, with varied symptoms. We look forward to working closely with the innovative and collaborative teams at Rune Labs and Emerald Innovations to capture a holistic and precise pattern of motor symptom activity over time for people in our screening study."
"Parkinson's is a heterogeneous condition, adding to the challenge of assessing treatment benefit without a personalized view of each trial participant's symptom activity," said Brian Pepin, CEO of Rune Labs. "Through StriveStudy, our biopharma partners are able to collect large quantities of continuous multimodal data to characterize participant's disease activity across a range of clinical features. We are excited to collaborate with Aspen Neuroscience to help them characterize patient symptoms as they bring their personalized cell therapy into clinical testing."
"We are delighted to collaborate with Aspen Neuroscience," said Dr. Dina Katabi, MIT professor and the co-founder and president of Emerald Innovations, Inc. "A significant hurdle in Parkinson's disease clinical trials is the reliable monitoring of disease progression and medication response without the need to enroll hundreds or even thousands of patients. Empirical evidence has demonstrated that readings from the Emerald sensor offer a dependable marker for tracking disease progression. The Emerald sensor gathers this data without body contact, relying solely on the analysis of radio signals in the environment as patients go about their normal lives."
About DHT in the Trial Ready Cohort Screening Study
Aspen will partner with Rune Labs to deeply characterize each patient's symptoms in the Trial Ready Cohort, including the collection of multimodal data, thereby enabling robust disease characterization over time. This will include objective measures of tremor and dyskinesia levels captured on FDA-cleared StrivePD on the Apple Watch, medication monitoring, as well as Apple HealthKit, including global activity (e.g., daily steps).
Aspen and Emerald will collaborate to assess passive "invisible" in-home monitoring of participants enrolled in the Trial Ready Cohort. This will include gait speed measured across walking intervals, sleep onset, the amount of time between entering different sleep stages; sleep duration, sleep efficiency and WASO: the total time spent in the WAKE stage after sleep onset.
About Parkinson's Disease
Parkinson's disease is the world's second most common neurodegenerative disease, affecting more than 10 million people worldwide, including more than 1 million in the U.S., where an additional 90,000+ people are diagnosed every year. Patients can experience non-motor symptoms such as mental and behavioral changes, sleep problems, depression, memory difficulties and fatigue; and motor symptoms caused by the loss of dopamine neurons in the brain, including unintended or uncontrollable movements (dyskinesia), shaking (tremor), stiffness, and difficulty with balance and coordination, which worsen over time.
By the time of diagnosis, it is common for people to have lost the majority of cells in the brain that make dopamine. To date, there is no disease-modifying therapy that can stop, replace or prevent the loss of dopamine neurons or slow the progression of PD.
About Aspen Neuroscience
Headquartered in San Diego, Aspen Neuroscience, Inc. is a clinical development-stage, private company focused on personalized (autologous) regenerative medicine. The company is developing patient-derived iPSCs to create personalized cell therapies that address diseases with high unmet medical needs, beginning with autologous neuron replacement for Parkinson's disease and extending across the brain and affected organs.
A leading iPSC platform company, Aspen combines stem cell biology with the latest artificial intelligence and genomic approaches to investigate patient-specific, restorative treatments. The company has developed a best-in-class platform to create and optimize iPSC-derived cell therapies, which includes in-house bioinformatics, manufacturing and QC.
About Emerald Innovations, Inc.
Emerald Innovations is a health analytics company that specializes in digital health solutions for passive, contactless in-home monitoring. Emerald seamlessly captures continuous health data from patients as they go about their normal lives. The Emerald biosensors fall under a cutting-edge category known as "Invisibles." Installed in the homes of study participants, these sensors continuously analyze surrounding radio signals. Using artificial intelligence, they extract patients' physiological data while prioritizing their privacy. Emerald simplifies clinical trials for its clients by obtaining statistically significant biomarkers, making them readily available to clinicians and data analysts, and consistently providing updates on the progress of clinical trials. Emerald's clientele encompasses big pharma, Fortune 500 pharmaceutical firms, innovative biotech companies, and leading disease research foundations.
About Rune Labs
Rune Labs is a software and data analytics company for precision neurology, supporting care delivery and therapy development. StrivePD is the company's care delivery ecosystem for Parkinson's disease, enabling patients and clinicians to better manage Parkinson's by providing access to curated dashboards summarizing a range of patient data sources, and by connecting patients to clinical trials. For therapeutics development, biopharma and medical device companies leverage Rune's technology, network of engaged clinicians and patients, and large longitudinal real-world datasets to expedite development programs. The company has received financial backing from leading investors such as Eclipse Ventures, DigiTx, TruVenturo and Moment Ventures. For more information, please visit runelabs.io and strive.group.
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