AbD Serotec enters anti-idiotype antibodies growth area
Recombinant anti-idiotype antibodies to be used as r&d development tools
AbD Serotec, a business unit of biotechnology company MorphoSys, has become active in a new growth area. The firm is increasingly providing anti-idiotype antibodies against existing antibody drugs and drug candidates to accompany their preclinical and clinical development.
The firm already provides anti-idiotype antibodies to several international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. They are also being used in-house to support MorphoSys’s proprietary development programmes in cancer and inflammatory diseases.
The growing number of therapeutic antibodies in clinical development is driving the demand for tools to monitor their concentration and behaviour in patients, including critical parameters such as pharmacokinetics and immunogenicity, the firm said. Since the majority of antibody-based drug candidates in clinical trials today are fully human, the detection tools must differentiate between the drug and other antibodies present in patient serum or plasma samples. HuCAL-based anti-idiotype antibodies are said to be ideal tools to detect the respective drug candidate with very high sensitivity. With its fully recombinant HuCAL technology, AbD Serotec can provide these tools quickly, allowing customers to develop assays for non-clinical and clinical samples in a short timeframe.
‘We see tools supporting preclinical research and clinical trials as a real growth opportunity, in which we can deliver solutions with our cutting-edge antibody technology,’ said Dieter Feger, head of AbD Serotec. ‘The use of recombinant technology is a major advantage that positions us well in this growing market.’
‘Anti-idiotype antibodies represent an important synergy between our therapeutic and non-therapeutic business units,’ added Dr Arndt Schottelius, chief development officer of MorphoSys. ‘AbD Serotec now broadly supports our proprietary development programmes, providing high-quality analytical tools with excellent sensitivity for our pre-clinical and clinical work.’
