Collaboration announced for discovery of therapeutic oncology leads

Company focused on the discovery and optimisation of fully human antibodies, IONTAS, and a private biopharmaceutical company, aTen Therapeutics, have announced a collaboration for the discovery of therapeutic oncology leads.

Under the terms of the agreement, IONTAS will use its proprietary antibody discovery platforms to deliver antibodies against biological targets selected by aTen.

“The use of traditional in vivo technologies can work well to generate simple therapeutic antibodies, but with increasing requirements for specificity, function, developability, and affinity, these traditional approaches are not always appropriate,” explained Dr John McCafferty, CEO and founder of IONTAS. “IONTAS will apply its technologies to overcome limitations of other platforms to generate therapeutic leads against pre-defined specification from aTen, to help its current pipeline progress.”

“IONTAS was selected because of its technological expertise and proven track record of delivering antibodies to all its partners,” commented Prof Chris Wood, chairman and founder of aTen. “We value the extensive experience IONTAS can add to advancing aTen’s therapeutic programmes in the fight against cancer.”