Chiome Bioscience: Speed and diversity for antibodies against tough antigen targets
Chiome wants to talk about science during BIO-Europe Spring 2010.
Chiome’s meetings in Barcelona with pharmaceuticals and biotechs represent the first business development effort outside Japan for Chiome Bioscience, according to Dr Fujiwara, who is the company’s chief executive and president.
“We are not yet familiar with many of the companies outside of Asia, so I am hoping to increase our awareness of their interests and projects, while at the same time introducing our company and its unique technology,” he said.
“My immediate focus is meeting with potential partners who are perhaps struggling to identify new types of antibodies capable of hitting tough antigen targets,” he said.
Dr Fujiwara, Chiome Bioscience
In February, 2010, the company received a milestone payment for collaborative research with Chugai Pharmaceutical for antibody preparation from the ADLib platform, and promptly received a second payment when Chugai decided to dramatically expand the scope of work in the second year of the project.
Chugai is a subsidiary of Roche Pharmholding, the dominant force in antibody development with an estimated 60% share of sales worldwide.
In September 2009, Chiome Bioscience entered into a service agreement with China Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research for monoclonal antibody production.
The Chugai payments, along with the closing of a Series D financing round next month that was “highly successful,” according to Dr Fujiwara, has provided Chiome Bioscience with a solid financial basis, such that the CEO is not seeking meetings with potential investment partners at BIO-Europe Spring.
“We are uniquely interested in discussing science projects in Barcelona,” he told partneringNEWS.
“We have two key competitive advantages with the ADLib platform, which are speed and diversity, that can create a high value added service for a partner’s development program,” he said.
“Our great strength is speed because we can provide antibodies in two weeks, even for difficult antigen targets,” he said, explaining a conventional system requires four to six weeks.
“These high affinity antibodies against refractory antigens simply cannot be addressed by legacy hybridoma technology,” he said.
“Our second strength is the unique and theoretically limitless diversity of antibodies generated,” he added.
A non-immune based system using the avian DT40 cell line, the ADLib platform provides a diversified B-cell library autonomously by activating DNA recombination in the immunoglobulin locus.
The accelerated gene conversion and diversity results in a capability for Chiome Bioscience to develop high avidity antibodies against typically tough antigens such as pathogens, and to discriminate against protein targets or epitopes that are highly homologous or conserved among species.
“Because of the uniqueness of our antibodies, we do not seek to compete with legacy methods that currently are being used by a pharmaceutical or biotechnology partner, instead we are seeking to collaborate on generating new antibody types to meet their challenges,” explained Fujiwara.
At some point in the future, Fujiwara said Chiome Bioscience may consider opportunities for out-licensing its technology.
But at BIO-Europe Spring 2010 in Barcelona, Dr Hidetaka Seo, Senior Director of R&D Department is a man with a mission seeking meetings with scientists ready to test the potential of the ADLib platform for developing new antibodies.
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