Poseida will apply UniDab binders, which demonstrate significant advantages over traditional single chain variable antibody fragment (scFv) binders, to the development of its next generation CAR-T therapies.
The new collaboration follows a commercial license agreement between the companies that was announced in May of 2017.
Under the terms of the new agreement, Teneobio will generate multiple UniDab product candidates using its proprietary UniRat® transgenic human antibody ‘heavy-chain only’ rodent platform and its state-of-the-art sequence-based discovery engine, TeneoSeek.
Poseida will have exclusive global licensing rights for the clinical development and commercialization of specific UniDabs for CAR-T therapies.
Teneobio will receive an upfront payment and is eligible to receive future research, development and regulatory milestone payments per UniDab candidate, with total potential earnings of over $250 million for CAR-T therapies developed by Poseida. Teneobio would also receive royalties on worldwide net sales of each CAR-T therapy.
Teneobio CEO Roland Buelow said: “Domain antibodies have been clinically validated as excellent targeting moieties in CAR-T cells. They confer robust in vivo specificity and efficacy. They are smaller in size, have greater humanicity, and superior developability relative to standard scFv’s.
“The use of UniDabs as binders in CAR-T products is predicted to result in a lack of tonic signaling and lower immunogenicity, thus solving some of the problems of the first-generation, scFv-based CAR-T therapies.”
Poseida CEO Eric Ostertag said: “Teneobio’s UniDab binders are an ideal match for Poseida’s novel and industry-leading CAR-T platform technologies. Poseida has demonstrated that UniDabs can be engineered to serve as binding molecules for our CAR-T therapeutics and oftentimes may function better than other binders for use in CAR-T products.”
Source: Company Press Release