Harbour BioMed inks agreement for ‘next generation biologic discovery’
Harbour BioMed’s platform for heavy chain only antibodies (HCAbs) generates fully human heavy chain antibodies to be used to accelerate the discovery and development of biologic therapeutics.
Jinhson Wang, CEO of Harbour BioMed said in a statement, “Drug discovery in the burgeoning fields of immuno-oncology and immunotherapy is relying increasingly on advanced biological approaches to selectively attack one or more immune targets and modulate the immune system to treat cancer and other diseases.”
Harbour has used its HCAb platform in other discovery and development programs to create alternatives for domain antibodies, bi-specific and multi-specific antibodies, and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies.
“The HCAb platform is emerging as a powerful technology to enable next generation biologic discovery for our internal portfolio and a select group of licensing partners,” Wang further explained.
While Harbour has not released the name of its licensing partner, it did state that the company was a global pharmaceutical organization specializing in immunology and immune-oncology.
Through this agreement, Harbour will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and will be eligible to receive further development and sales related milestone payments and royalties.
In June of 2018 WuXi Biologics and Harbour entered an agreement with WuXi Biologics to develop and manufacture ‘heavy chain only’ antibodies. Per that deal, WuXi provided services to supply Harbour’s products for clinical trials.