Following on from recent licensing deals with Celgene and Innovent, Adimab announced yesterday it had signed a non-exclusive agreement with Novo Nordisk, taking its mAb discovery platform direct to the Danish biopharma.
Novo Nordisk Vice President Hanne Risager Romedah told Biopharma-Reporter.com the firm sees Adimab’s technology “as the most advanced and most efficient antibody development platform among the display-based technologies available.”
The fully human antibody library uses a yeast approach in identifying large numbers of Immunoglobulin G antibody isotopes (IgGs) specific to a particular target, which gives the advantage ovr mice or rabbit models that it filters out antibodies that do not behave well as a protein, Adimab told this publication last month.
Romedah added the deal significantly increases “Novo Nordisk's capabilities to very efficiently develop fully human antibodies for therapeutic products,” especially combined with the mouse-based technology it licensed from Kymab in April.
“The deal involves full transfer of the Adimab technology platform to Novo Nordisk,” he said, adding staff will be trained up “enabling independent application of the technology in-house to discover and optimize human monoclonal antibodies with minimal reporting and no diligence obligations towards Adimab.”
In exchange Novo Nordisk will pay upfront payments, annual licensing fees, and royalties on commercialised products.
Rising Interest
This is the third technology transfer deal of its kind after GlaxoSmithKline and Biogen Idec signed similar agreements with Adimab earlier this year.
Adimab CEO Tillman Gerngross told us last month the firm had “cornered the market” since launching the platform in 2009, with on average four partnerships a year, “typically top 20 pharma,” nearly all of which already have access to standard antibody tech using mice or rabbits.
Romedah explained the industry was looking to mAb discovery partners like Adimab as technologies are becoming “increasingly complicated and highly specialized to meet requirements for fast discovery and high diversity.
“It takes a lot of dedicated efforts to develop such technologies, and thus the industry will to a large degree rely on such platforms to be in-licensed from third parties,” he added.