More or less on topic is fine by me. Am I right in thinking SGEN have made up a lot of ground on IMGN over the last year or so ?
This kind of on topic too - it's not antibodies, but is aiming to be directly competitive.
(The marketed polyclonal antibody mentioned is from Protherics) -
In Vivo Proof of Concept for Anticalins(R)
Wednesday March 10, 3:00 am ET
FREISING, Germany, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- PIERIS Proteolab AG, a leading biopharmaceutical and protein engineering company, today announced that one of its lead development candidates, Digical, completely neutralized lethal toxicity caused by an overdose of the cardiac steroid digoxin in a preclinical study. The dose of this Anticalin® was only approximately half the recommended dose of a marketed polyclonal antibody fragment product approved for the same purpose.
Recently, PIERIS has generated lipocalin muteins named Anticalins® against more than half a dozen protein targets with very high affinity and specificity. Now, the company has demonstrated therapeutic efficacy in a relevant preclinical model. This underlines the company's ability to generate development candidates from its proprietary Anticalin® technology platform. These Anticalins® are able to compete with antibodies.
"This reinforces our strong belief that Anticalins® themselves can serve as biopharmaceutical drugs," stated Martin Pohlchen, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of PIERIS. "The antagonistic mode of action is relevant to many indications and is one of the corner stones for our internal product development strategy."
"Further to our high affinity Anticalins® against protein targets we have now developed Anticalins® against hapten targets, with an affinity as low as 100 picomolar," stated Prof Arne Skerra, co-founder of PIERIS.
Steffen Schlehuber, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of PIERIS commented, "The results of our in vivo studies emphasize the molecular benefits offered by Anticalins® in the complexation of small molecules. The combination of these data with the proven binding characteristics, safety data, stability and manufacturing advantages make Anticalins® promising active ingredients for many diverse applications."
PIERIS Proteolab AG:
PIERIS Proteolab AG is a leading biopharmaceutical and protein engineering company that has specialized on the development and commercialisation of Anticalins®. Its activities are focused on therapeutic applications, as well as medical diagnostics, especially in the area of tumour and cardiovascular diseases. Anticalins® are engineered proteins with antibody-like binding functions derived from natural lipocalins as scaffold. PIERIS developed this revolutionary technology, which allows the rapid generation of high-affinity human protein product candidates against defined disease targets. With its Anticalin® technology, PIERIS intends to build a large and diverse product portfolio both through developing its internal proprietary products and through collaborative arrangements with pharmaceutical, biotechnology and genomics companies. For this purpose, PIERIS has generated the Theracalin® library containing more than 10 billion unique Anticalins® derived from a fully human lipocalin scaffold. In October 2002 PIERIS closed a Series A financing round of 12 million EUR. PIERIS is based in Freising, near Munich, Germany.
Anticalin®, Anticalins®, Theracalin®, PIERIS Proteolab®, and the Company's logo are registered trademarks or service marks of PIERIS. |
