TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Radiant Biotherapeutics, a startup biotechnology company developing a revolutionary antibody platform to deliver transformative therapies for patients facing life-changing disease, announced it has received a USD $2 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop the next generation of HIV biologics based on Radiant’s Multabody™ platform.
The agreement includes a commitment to three potential infectious disease targets which includes the HIV funding and interest in a potential equity investment in the company. The funding supports a two year-long project, which enables Radiant to evaluate the Multabody™ platform’s ability to destroy latent stores of the HIV virus, along with its ability to eliminate circulating viral particles.
“Our Multabody™ platform potentially addresses a shortcoming of existing antiviral treatments for HIV,” said Arthur J. Fratamico, President and Chief Executive Officer of Radiant Biotherapeutics. “Treatments must attack and neutralize circulating viral particles in the bloodstream. But to cure the disease, they must also destroy the latent viral stores that can be found hidden in specific cell types. Our highly avid and multi-specific platform can attack several parts of the virus at once, delivering exceptional potency and breadth against multiple HIV subtypes. This makes it an ideal weapon against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”
In particular, Mr. Fratamico noted, Multabody™ therapeutics stand out for their strong grip on targets – a feature known as avidity. This high avidity, along with the ability to target multiple binding areas of a target virus, potentially enables Multabody™ treatments to overcome the high mutation rate which helps HIV to escape traditional therapies.
The exceptional potency of Multabody™ therapeutics means that small amounts of drug can have a powerful impact in destroying both circulating viral particles and viral reservoirs in immune system cells known as memory CD4+ T cells, as well as other types of cells. The high potency makes treatments built around Radiant’s Multabody™ therapeutics likely to have a low-cost profile, potentially making it possible to help more people in low- and moderate-income countries.
“We’re excited about Radiant’s powerful antibody platform being deployed against HIV,” said Jean-Philippe Julien, Senior Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. “HIV is a challenging virus that constantly mutates and escapes immune responses and suboptimal treatments. We have high hopes for a Multabody™ to be developed against HIV that can act as a new approach in eradicating the disease.”
Radiant Biotherapeutics, built around foundational science developed at SickKids and the University of Toronto, emerged from stealth mode earlier this year with funding from Amplitude Ventures. It is developing a novel pipeline of multi-valent and multi-specific biologics in multiple disease areas.
About Radiant Biotherapeutics
Radiant Biotherapeutics is a revolutionary antibody platform company leading the new frontier of multi-valent, multi-specific therapeutics to deliver transformative therapies for patients. Radiant’s proprietary Multabody™ platform leverages avidity and multi-specificity simultaneously, to generate highly efficacious Multabodies with superior potency than other antibody platforms. These powerful Multabodies have potential to deliver a new class of biologics to tackle complex, heterogenous diseases, such as cancer, that often have challenging targets and mechanisms. Multabody™ production and manufacturing is flexible, modular and scalable, and leverages standard antibody CMC processes. The groundbreaking efficiency of the platform is driving a novel pipeline of mono-, bi- and tri-specific biologics in multiple therapeutics areas. With offices in Toronto and Philadelphia, Radiant has forged multiple strategic partnerships that validate the Multabody™ platform’s broad scientific and clinical utility. For more, visit radiantbio.com.
