The Germany-headquartered biopharma giant originally entered into an agreement with Bioinvent in 2008 in order to discover antibodies, licensing the n-CoDeR fully human antibody technology from the Swedish firm.
“This library technology,” Bayer spokesperson Diana Scholz told Biopharma-Reporter.com, is “one of our workhorses for antibody discovery. Since we know the technology very well we decided to extend the license agreement.”
The libraries contain over 20 billion fully human antibody fragments which all have the same framework structure. According to Bioinvent, each antibody has a unique combination of Complementarity Determining Regions (CDRs) - defining its antigen binding specificity - which the technology recombines into new antibody molecules.
This allows the library to contain a wide variety of antibodies, upping the chances of discovering antibodies with high affinity and high specificity against specified targets.
This deal extends Bayer’s access to the technology which Scholz said was operated in-house as part of a non-exclusive licensing agreement. No financial details have been disclosed but on top of a licensing fee Bioinvent will receive success-based milestone payments and future royalties.
Bayer’s Bio Strategy
In the last few months, several Big Biopharmas have signed or extended license agreements with antibody discovery tech firms, including Novo Nordisk, GlaxoSmithKline and Shire.
“The importance of biologics is constantly rising,” said Scholz. “Biologics research has also become increasingly important at Bayer HealthCare in recent years and is to be continuously expanded over the next few years.”
She added a number of Bayer’s top selling products were biologics, and “the medium-term objective is to increase protein therapeutic agents' share of Bayer's pipeline to a third of all projects.”