Adcentrx and AvantGen Enter a New Partnership with a Three-year, Multi-target Collaboration to Discover Antibodies for Novel Antibody-drug Conjugates
Adcentrx Therapeutics a biotechnology company focused on accelerating breakthroughs in antibody drug conjugate therapeutic development, and AvantGen, a leader in the use of yeast display technology for human antibody discovery and optimization, announced a three-year, multi-target partnership for the discovery of antibodies to be developed into novel ADC therapeutic candidates.
Under the terms of the collaboration, Adcentrx will specify targets against which AvantGen will screen for novel antibodies using its yeast display system. Adcentrx will be responsible for engineering the antibodies into ADC therapeutic candidates and has worldwide development and commercialization rights. AvantGen will be eligible to receive milestone payments for achievement of certain development milestones.
“We are excited to enter this new partnership with AvantGen to accelerate our ADC development efforts,” said Hui Li, Ph.D., President and CEO of Adcentrx. “What attracted us to AvantGen initially is how their yeast display technology and human antibody libraries mimic human diversity to yield high affinity and very specific antibodies. Through our ongoing collaboration, AvantGen has demonstrated its capabilities in rapidly discovering a diverse antibody repertoire with high developability against defined targets. A key objective at Adcentrx, through this collaboration and opportunistic licensing activities, is to identify the best antibodies which we can leverage to assemble a pipeline of next generation ADC therapeutics.”
“We are proud to partner with Adcentrx to help accelerate its ADC pipeline build with our robust human antibody discovery platform,” said Xiaomin Fan, Ph.D., President and CEO of AvantGen. “The speed that Adcentrx is able to take lead antibody candidates to development stage with its ADC technology is truly remarkable. We believe that this new partnership will enable Adcentrx to develop the most promising next generation ADC therapeutics with our high-quality antibodies.”