Ablynx sets focus on pharma collaborations
pharmafile | December 14, 2015 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Research and Development | Ablynx, collaboration, nanobodies, partnership
Drug development companies should prioritise strategic pharma collaborations to keep up with the next wave of immuno-oncology treatments, the chief executive of Ablynx says.
Edwin Moses, chief executive of Ghent-based Ablynx, told Pharmafile.com his company is targeting a mix of pharma collaborations and home-grown developments to bring new drugs to market.
Ablynx is in the business of developing drugs using its proprietary nanobody technology platform. Nanobodies are a novel class of cloned proteins based on single-domain antibody fragments that contain the unique structural and functional properties of naturally-occurring heavy chain only antibodies.
These small antibodies were originally found in animals related to camels, llamas and alpacas, and now the platform allows for the rapid generation and large-scale production of novel biological therapeutics that have potential in a wide range of human diseases.
Moses refers to the nanobodies as “the next wave of treatments in immuno-oncology”. The most important feature for the company’s R&D plans, is their small size and unique structure, which means nanobodies are can be used as building blocks for generating the novel biological drugs Ablynx is working on. The company has more than 30 proprietary and partnered product candidates in development for the treatment of a wide range of diseases, including inflammation, haematology, respiratory diseases, immuno-oncology and oncology.
“The positives [of the antibodies] come from their size, which means they are able to penetrate more effectively,” Moses says. “They are only one tenth of the size of a conventional antibody. It means there is a simplicity to them, and allows us to link up to six antibodies together to hit different targets, such as out immuno-oncology targets. We have a combination in one molecule that is part of a collaboration with MSD to trial the platform with Keytruda (pembrolizumab), and just hit a milestone which earnt up a £3.5 million payment.”
And the company is targeting more collaborations in 2016, with a programme that includes an orphan drug at Phase III stage, an antiviral at Phase II and a drug being developed by AbbVie that’s also at Phase II stage, and we also have other geographic collaborators in Japan and China. Moses says the partnerships will be key to his company – and others of a similar size in the pharma industry being able to expand into different therapeutic areas.
“Our business model is based on collaborations. Our collaborators are really good at providing and generating data about our molecule. We can then have an iterative process to use the feedback gathered and feed that into the process of drug delivery.
“There are so many benefits from collaborations. It opens up a huge range of therapeutic areas. We are not insubstantial in size but we can still only be so good in a finite number of areas. Immuno-oncology is moving on so quickly that it’s important to be able to respond quickly to changes in the field and new developments. Unless we partnered up with a big company who could drive this forward quickly we would get left behind.”
Lilian Anekwe
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