CAMBRIDGE, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Abzena plc (AIM: ABZA, ‘Abzena’), the life sciences group providing services and technologies to enable the development and manufacture of biopharmaceutical products, has entered into a master service agreement with one of America’s leading academic medical centres, NYU Langone Health (New York, US). The agreement, for protein engineering and drug discovery services, will help NYU Langone’s drug discovery accelerator, the Office of Therapeutics Alliances (OTA), to develop novel biopharmaceutical therapeutics.
The first project under this master agreement centres around the development of a novel biopharmaceutical being developed by NYU OTA for the treatment of severe autoimmune disease. Abzena will provide integrated development support from its bioassay, immunology and protein engineering groups.
NYU School of Medicine is one of the USA’s top-ranked medical schools. An integral part of NYU Langone Health, the School of Medicine at its core is committed to improving the human condition through medical education, scientific research, and direct patient care.
Dr. Campbell Bunce, SVP, Scientific Operations, Abzena commented:
“It’s fantastic that our expertise and integrated offering across our biology group is being used in the development of another promising treatment.
“This agreement represents another example of Abzena supporting exciting drug candidates from academic groups, utilising not just our services but also our significant biologics know-how.”
Dr. Nadim Shohdy, Assistant Dean and Director, Therapeutics Alliances, NYU Langone commented:
“We are very excited to execute both the master agreement, and to launch this inaugural project with Abzena.
“This partnership will augment NYU Langone’s access to deep biologics capabilities and expertise to further enhance OTA’s mission to translate the research of our faculty into therapeutic products that help patients.”
Notes to editors
About Abzena
Abzena (AIM: ABZA) provides proprietary technologies and complementary services to enable the development and manufacture of biopharmaceutical products.
The term ‘ABZENA Inside’ is used by Abzena to describe products that have been created using its proprietary technologies and are being developed by its partners, and include Composite Human Antibodies™ and ThioBridge™ Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs). Abzena has the potential to earn future licence fees, milestone payments and royalties on ABZENA Inside products.
Abzena offers the following services and technologies across its principal sites in Cambridge (UK), San Diego, California (USA) and Bristol, Pennsylvania (USA):
- Biology research studies, including immunogenicity assessment of candidate biopharmaceutical products and bioassay development;
- Protein engineering to create humanized antibodies and deimmunised therapeutic proteins;
- Cell line development for the manufacture of recombinant proteins and antibodies;
- Contract process development and GMP manufacture of biopharmaceuticals, including monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins for preclinical and clinical studies;
- Contract synthetic chemistry and bioconjugation research services focused on antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs);
- Proprietary site-specific conjugation technologies and novel payloads for ADC development;
- GMP manufacturing of ADC linkers, payloads & combined linker-payloads; and
- GMP analytical services for biopharmaceutical manufacturing projects.
For more information, please see www.abzena.com.
About NYU Office of Therapeutics Alliances and Office of Industrial Liaison
The NYU Office of Therapeutics Alliances (OTA) was created in 2013 to accelerate and de-risk drug discovery projects developed at NYU School of Medicine towards partnerships with investors, biopharma, and non-profits. The NYU Office of Industrial Liaison (OIL) promotes the commercial development of NYU discoveries and actively seeks commercial partners for licensing and research collaborations. Over the past ten years NYU has ranked first among all universities in income from technology licensing.
For more information, please visit http://www.nyulmc.org/ota and http://oil.med.nyu.edu/.
