Takeda to license Trianni mAb discovery platform
Distinguished by a novel chimeric gene segment design, the Trianni platform provides Takeda with access to a complete human antibody repertoire that has been optimized for the isolation of fully human therapeutics.
Matthias Wabl, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO of Trianni, told Biopharma-reporter.com that “for antibody drugs, you want the antibodies to be completely human and you want the complete repertoire that humans can make.
“So we took out the genes that encode for antibodies in mice, and we inserted the human genes – but we didn’t do it in a way that other companies have done it. We constructed the selection of genes on a computer and only made human some parts.
“We’ve synthesized large pieces of DNA, and interspersed within these sequences, snippets of human DNA,” Wabl said. “We have synthesized large pieces of DNA and we took the mouse sequences which we previously took out and replaced parts that encode human antibodies with human DNA.”
mAb Growth
mAb development has seen rapid development recently, with companies such as Pfizer, Regeneron and GlaxoSmithKline moving into the market.
“Monoclonal antibodies are now the ‘hot’ drugs – the targets are three fold: infectious disease, antibiotic resistant-bacteria, and then antibodies used against cancer,” he added. But no drugs have been generated from the out-licensing of Trianni’s discovery platform yet.
“First-generation human antibody mice were made in the 1990s…but they didn’t have the full repertoire and were restricted in their usefulness,” Wabl said. “Because antibodies are specific…the more antibodies the mouse can make, the better off you are. The important thing is that the mouse makes human antibodies.”
“With its many distinctive features, most notably a full repertoire expressed from chemically synthesized gene segments, we are confident the platform will prove highly productive for Takeda,” he added.
“We are excited to add Trianni’s transgenic mice to Takeda’s repertoire of platform technologies for the generation of therapeutic antibodies,” said Tetsuyuki Maruyama, Ph.D., General Manager of Pharmaceutical Research Division of Takeda. “Takeda has a growing biologics pipeline and the Trianni Mouse is a natural addition to enhance our ongoing research capabilities in the area.”
