Ablexis inks licensing deal with Memorial Sloan Kettering

SAN DIEGO—Ablexis LLC, a biopharmaceutical company focused on licensing its AlivaMab Mouse technology for antibody drug discovery, has announced a license agreement with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The license grants Memorial Sloan Kettering rights to research, develop and commercialize—with rights to sub-license—certain AlivaMab antibodies against a specific target.

The antibodies were generated by the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute Inc. under a non-exclusive license of AlivaMab Mouse announced in January 2017. Under this new license, Ablexis could receive clinical development and approval milestones, and a running revenue share of sales of products derived from the AlivaMab antibodies.

“The AlivaMab Mouse is an increasingly validated platform for generating antibodies with qualities desirable in a potential therapeutic,” said Dr. Larry Green, CEO of Ablexis. “This agreement with Memorial Sloan Kettering exemplifies the speed and value-add that the AlivaMab Mouse can bring to a therapeutic antibody discovery program.”

The AlivaMab Mouse is designed to enable and optimize the efficient discovery and development of the next generation of human therapeutic antibodies. The platform has been validated for antibody drug discovery by Ablexis and partners in various formats—including regular antibodies, bispecifics and chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapies—and for a range of applications, such as:

• Sequence diverse panels of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs)

• Epitope diverse panels of mAbs

• Challenging targets such as G-protein-coupled receptors

• Challenging design goals such as IC50 values of very low picomolar levels.

Ablexis has non-exclusively licensed the AlivaMab Mouse technology to multiple companies, including global pharmaceutical companies, public and private biotechnology companies and other entities.