Ablynx awarded Euro 1.9M grant to explore new therapeutics

Ablynx, the biopharmaceutical company behind the development of therapeutic treatment Nanobodies, has received a grant for almost Euro 1.9m to speed up the exploration of these applications.

The grant, from the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders, Belgium, aims to look at the drug format flexibility, its ability to access targets and in the longer term address issues of efficient virus neutralisation capability. This grant will enable Ablynx to expand its dominant intellectual property portfolio.

Research under the grant will be conducted in collaboration with research groups, including teams at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, led by Professor Verrips, and with a wide network of academic collaborators in Belgium, Norway, Germany, the UK, Spain and France.

"We are extremely pleased to tap into world class biological and disease expertise to exploit new applications for Nanobodies" said Dr Hans de Haard, senior director discovery research at Ablynx. "This research will build on the data from a concurrent programme in which Nanobodies have been produced against a wide variety of targets grouped into target families according to structural homology or biological links. The target families addressed include extracellular targets such as transmembrane proteins and receptors, enzymes, serum proteins and soluble signaling factors."

Dr Hennie Hoogenboom, chief scientific officer at Ablynx said: "IWT's continued support of Ablynx's Nanobody technology platform is very encouraging. We believe the grant will allow us to explore a number of innovative therapeutic Nanobody applications and will help to maintain the groundbreaking progress we are making, accelerating the exploitation of Nanobodies across multiple target classes, whilst continuing to ensure our IP is protected from ever increasing competition."