WuXi Biologics and Almirall announced the signing of a strategic collaboration agreement enabling Almirall to leverage the proprietary WuXiBody™ platform to develop bispecific antibodies for dermatological diseases.
Under the terms of the agreement, Almirall gains access to WuXi Biologics' proprietary antibody platforms including WuXiBody™, a versatile bispecific platform with flexible valency to fit target biology, to discover multiple novel bispecific antibodies. WuXi Biologics will receive an upfront payment as well as development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments for each bispecific antibody generated from this platform, and will also be entitled to royalties based on global sales generated by these projects.
"This agreement is a big step forward for us in our objective of becoming a leader in medical dermatology,” Bhushan Hardas, M.D., MBA, Chief Scientific Officer of Almirall, said. “With WuXi Biologics' know-how in biologic technologies and Almirall's expertise in Dermatology, we will be able to identify bispecific antibodies as effective next-generation therapies for helping patients suffering from dermatological disorders."
"We are delighted to establish this collaboration with Almirall, the 12th global partnership since we launched this exciting platform in August 2018,” Dr. Chris Chen, Chief Executive Officer of WuXi Biologics, said. “This represents one further step in validating the power and versatile applications of WuXiBody™ in multiple therapeutic areas, underlining our leadership in next-generation biologic technologies and demonstrating our contributions to enable global partners to develop more new treatments for patients worldwide. WuXi Biologics is committed to developing globally leading technologies to accelerate and transform biologics discovery, development and manufacturing."
WuXiBody™ Platform enables almost any mAb sequence pairs to be assembled into bispecific constructs. They are expected to have low immunogenicity risk and longer in vivo half-life. WuXiBody™ Platform also has its unique structural flexibility, which makes it convenient to build various formats with different combination of valencies (1+1, 1+2, 2+2) to meet the requirements of different target biology.