The study, which took place in Zumutor’s R&D site in Bengaluru, India, combined Catalent’s GPEx mammalian cell line platform with Zumutor’s fucose knockout technology and resulted in a platform which expressed high levels of an anti-HER2 antibody.
“This collaboration was a research effort to produce an enhanced ADCC antibody for Zumutor leveraging our GPEx platform, and showed very promising results,” Greg Bleck, global head of R&D at Catalent Biologics told Biopharma-Reporter.com.
Zumutor’s platform removes fucose which increases binding of the antibody to FcgR3a receptor on effector cells, he continued, which was correlated with the observed increase in ADCC activity without compromising production yields.
Catalent attributes this to the stability of its GPEx platform, which it says allows cell lines to be modified quickly, producing a more potent antibody.
“The combination of GPEx and Zumutor’s technology is potentially useful for creating a next generation product for those products already in late stage clinical development or commercial production, in addition to giving an option to make a more potent product for those molecules that are in pre-clinical or early clinical development.”
No further plans have been announced around this technology collaboration, but Bleck told us “these initial results demonstrate the utility of the GPEx platform and the combination of these technologies could apply to other antibodies that would benefit from enhanced ADCC.”
Headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, Zumutor is developing several antibody candidates, including a biosimilar version of Roche’s humanized anti-Her2 receptor monoclonal antibody Herceptin (trastuzumab).