MAB Discovery and BioNTech are working together to push through the development of new antibody therapeutics using MAB’s technology platform.
MAB Discovery creates monoclonal antibodies by stimulating natural antibody maturation using its own sophisticated platform. On the back of a highly productive agreement signed in 2013, BioNTech, Europe’s largest privately held biopharma, has moved to agree to a new deal that will help the company develop antibodies for a selection of therapeutic targets, including cancer – a field which is predicted to be worth over $160B (€138B) by 2021.
BioNTech is one of the most advanced companies in the field of mRNA therapeutics, so it will be interesting to see how it combines this with the new antibodies that it hopes to develop with MAB Discovery. If these two forces were combined, we could end up with a tech as powerful as antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), of which 4 have already been approved since 2000. ADC Therapeutics developed ADCs – where a toxin is fixed to a highly specific antibody, ensuring its effects are felt by cancer cells only.
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