Janssen Research and Development forged a multi-target discovery agreement with San Diego-based AlivaMab Discovery Services that will use the company’s proprietary antibody discovery platform.
Janssen Research & Development forged a multi-target discovery agreement with San Diego-based AlivaMab Discovery Services (ADS) that will use the company’s proprietary antibody discovery platform.
This morning, AlivaMab announced the agreement to use its AlivaMab Mouse system, a best-in-class antibody discovery platform to boost Janssen’s R&D programs. Little was announced about the agreement between the two companies. AlivaMab said that it will “provide its expertise and capabilities” to generate therapeutic antibody candidates for Janssen. The larger pharma company, a division of life sciences giant Johnson & Johnson, will then evaluate the antibodies developed by AlivaMab. The company did not provide details on what kind of targets it may be seeking for Janssen.
John “Lippy” Lippincott, head of research at AlivaMab, said they were excited to strike the agreement and is pleased that Janssen has “entrusted” AlivaMab as a partner in its therapeutic antibody discovery efforts.
“ADS is delivering potent, picomolar-affinity human antibodies to its partners, in a greater number and a shorter timeline that beats other transgenic animal and in vitro display platforms. Our team of experts looks forward to collaborating with colleagues at Janssen in using AlivaMab Mouse to discover therapeutic antibody candidates,” Lippincott said in a statement.
The AlivaMab Mouse platform is a next-generation transgenic mouse platform for human therapeutic antibody discovery. Platform features include the only autonomously functioning immunoglobulin heavy, kappa and lambda transgenes with combinations of human and mouse coding and non-coding elements rationally-designed to produce adaptive immune responses that naturally generate panels of diverse, highly potent IgG antibodies. Also, the platform includes a broad diversity of gene segments, which together with other aspects of the Ig transgene designs, produce variable region diversity and consequent epitope diversity in the antigen-specific IgG responses superior to other transgenic animals, according to company data.
The AlivaMab Mouse system was initially developed by Ablexis, LLC. Last year, when Ablexis was acquired by Deerfield Management, ADS was spun out to provide antibody discovery services to other companies. Janssen is the latest in a string of companies to license the AlivaMab program. Other companies to harness AlivaMab include Eli Lilly, Corvidia Therapeutics, Allogene Therapeutics, Voyager Therapeutics and more.
Last year, the AlivaMab Mouse program hit a significant milestone with its first discovery to enter the clinic. In its brief announcement, Ablexis noted that additional therapeutic antibody candidates discovered using the AlivaMab Mouse platform are currently in late-stage preclinical development.
“Advancement of an AlivaMab antibody into clinical development a few short years after our partners started using AlivaMab Mouse for drug discovery represents another milestone in the ongoing validation of the AlivaMab Mouse platform”, Ablexis Chief Executive Officer Larry Green said in a statement at the time of the announcement.x
