arGEN-X BV, a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of therapeutic human antibodies (mAbs), today announced that it has received a €1.5 million grant from the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT). This grant will be used to accelerate pre-clinical development of the lead program, ARGX-109 and two further therapeutic mAb programs. All three mAb candidates originated from arGEN-X’s proprietary SIMPLE Antibody™ platform and are being developed by the Company to target the inflammation/oncology space.
Today’s award is the second grant that arGEN-X has received from the IWT. In October 2009, the Company received €1.3 million to develop and validate the SIMPLE Antibod platform, a pioneering approach to therapeutic human mAb generation.
In less than a year, the SIMPLE Antibody platform has demonstrated phenomenal productivity as a discovery engine, yielding therapeutic grade mAbs with highly differentiated functional attributes. SIMPLE Antibody candidates have unprecedented functional diversity against soluble, cell surface and highly conserved targets. Importantly, these mAbs do not require time-consuming engineering to ensure their gold standard affinities and potencies.
The power of the SIMPLE Antibody approach has allowed arGEN-X to progress its research porfolio into pre-clinical development in record time. Its most advanced mAb candidate ARGX-109 has ultra-high potency against IL-6, a cytokine playing an important role in autoimmune, inflammation and oncology indications. arGEN-X’s two other development programs also address targets of high functional relevance in inflammation and oncology. All SIMPLE Antibody™ candidates developed by arGEN-X to date show outstanding manufacturability, effectively reducing the transition time from discovery to development.
Prof Dr Hans de Haard, CSO of arGEN-X commented: “Today’s news highlights the power of our proprietary SIMPLE Antibody™ platform when compared to established human antibody technologies. Having already successfully validated the platform, we will apply this second IWT grant to the pre-clinical development of our lead product candidate ARGX-109 and drive forward two further therapeutic programs. Our rapid evolution and progress has reinforced our confidence in our technology’s ability to tranform the human therapeutic antibody landscape.”
arGEN-X’ SIMPLE Antibody Platform is based on the active immunization of outbred Camelids with targets to deliver antibodies whose variable regions are virtually identical in structure and sequence to those of human antibodies. arGEN-X combines selected variable domains with the constant domains of human antibodies to generate full size, human therapeutic antibodies as development candidates. The Company has validated its platform through in-house research programs on four human disease targets to date.
The company’s first patent was granted by the UK Patent and Trademark Office in July 2010. arGEN-X is globally prosecuting additional patent applications to provide it with broad protection of its technology. The SIMPLE Antibody™ Platform enjoys an independent, unencumbered patent position and is free of target gatekeeping restrictions.
In August 2009 arGEN-X raised €12.5 million in a Series A financing. This fund raising was supported by a number of experienced life science investors including Forbion Capital Partners, LSP, Crédit Agricole Private Equity, KBC Private Equity, BioGeneration Ventures, as well as existing shareholders Erasmus MC Biomedical Fund and Thuja Capital Healthcare Funds. The prestigious Belgian life sciences research institute VIB also invested this funding round.
arGEN-X
www.arGEN-X.com
