Cambridge, UK and Shanghai, China 11 October, 2016 – Kymab Limited (“Kymab”), a leading human mooclonal antibody biopharmaceutical company, and EpimAb Biotherapeutics, Inc (“EpimAb”), an emerging biopharmaceutical company specialising in bispecific antibodies, today announced a cross-licensing and development agreement to develop bispecific therapeutic antibodies against multiple targets. The parties will focus their efforts on immuno-oncology and will combine antibodies sourced from Kymab’s proprietary Kymouse™ platform with EpimAb’s proprietary Fabs-In-Tandem Immunoglobulin (FIT-Ig™) platform to generate multiple bispecific antibodies. Kymab will have the development and commercialisation rights to these bispecifics in all geographical regions outside of China, and, under the terms of the cross-license agreement, EpimAb will have the rights to the China market. Each party is eligible to receive milestone payments and royalties for development programmes pursued by the other party.
“Bispecific antibodies have enormous potential to exploit our growing molecular and cellular understanding of the tumour microenvironment as it relates to immuno-oncology,” said Dr. David Chiswell, CEO of Kymab. “This agreement provides new opportunities to realise genuinely synergistic therapeutic activities and our collaboration with EpimAb will allow us to generate innovative bispecific molecules based on parental antibodies from our Kymouse platform quickly and efficiently.”
“Our agreement with Kymab represents our first license agreement outside of China and we are looking forward to combining our complementary antibody technologies to create novel treatments for severe human diseases,” said Dr. Chengbin Wu, CEO and Founder of EpimAb. “Kymab’s expertise in generating world class antibodies specifically in the immuno-oncology area is a perfect strategic fit for EpimAb. The candidates from this collaboration will significantly strengthen EpimAb’s proprietary pipeline with highly innovative molecules.”
EpimAb’s innovative FIT-Ig technology offers a novel approach for generating bispecific antibodies, with the resulting molecules fully retaining the biological properties of their parental monoclonal antibodies without the need to significantly modify the basic structural elements of the bispecific antibody. FIT-Ig molecules generated to date have demonstrated excellent biological and pharmacological characteristics, as well as excellent physical-chemical properties. The combination of the Kymouse human antibody discovery platform with the FIT-Ig technology will assure the highest probability of finding the best-in-class bispecific antibodies with highly attractive drug properties.
