US Medarex casts around for local partners

US monoclonal antibody company Medarex has been in Melbourne this week testing the waters for potential collaborations and partnerships.

Dr Annarie Lyles, the company's senior director of business development, visited the Austin Research Institute yesterday where spoke with scientists about the company's humanised monoclonal antibody platform technology.

"There is great science going on in Australia and some wonderful opportunities to collaborate with people here," Lyles told Australian Biotechnology News after her presentation.

Medarex was originally started in 1987 as a spin-off from Dartmouth University. Lyles noted that the fortunes of the company had gone up and down, as antibody-based therapeutics have gone in and out of favour with investors, but said that the technology was finally coming into its own. "We think antibodies have arrived and will be here for a while," she said.

Medarex has pursued a business strategy of licensing and collaborative partnerships, Lyles explained. Generally, pharmaceutical companies and larger biotechnology companies have been interested in licensing the antibody technology, while smaller biotechnology companies have tended to form collaborative partnerships and joint ventures with Medarex.

"We're still licensing our technology but forming partnerships is our priority," Lyles explained.

The mainstay of the company's technology is its UltiMAb human antibody development system, which includes several strains of transgenic mice expressing human antibody genes developed by Medarex and by Japanese partner Kirin. Using these mice, the company is able to produce complete immune responses with fully humanised high-affinity antibodies.

Lyles said fully humanised antibodies had a much reduced risk of developing an immune reaction against the antibody, compared with chimaeric and non-human antibodies.

Medarex has also combined its UltiMAb technology with phage display technology from US company Biosite to create a high-throughput method for creating pools of antibodies for screening.

In addition, the company recently acquired intellectual property from Corixa, which will allow it to conjugate toxins and other therapeutics to antibodies to specifically act on targets.

According to Lyles, Medarex has a number of pre-clinical and clinical trials in progress for antibodies developed in-house and other companies are testing several more antibodies developed with their technology in the clinic.

Among them are an anti-CTLA4 antibody in Phase II trials for melanoma and prostate cancer, an anti-CD30 antibody in Phase I trials for Hodgkin's lymphoma and several pre-clinical trials for various kinds of tumours as well as autoimmune diseases.

European company IDM is in late-stage trials with an anti-HER-2 antibody for ovarian cancer; and GenMab, Centocor and Novartis also have trials in various stages for a variety of autoimmune diseases.

With the slowdown in the US market, Lyles said, it had been a difficult time for Medarex, although the company had enough cash on hand to weather out the slump. But she said that while agreements with some of the partners were being restructured due to the poor economic climate, opportunities to acquire new technology or take control of jointly developed products were there for the taking.

But the flat biotech market in the US has meant that Medarex put on hold plans to build its own commercial production facilities, instead taking advantage of the oversupply of contract manufacturing space currently opening up in the US. The company has focused on building its capacity to develop products through early-stage clinical trials in-house.

Lyles said that while genomics brought to the forefront many new targets for antibody therapeutics, the process of actually using the targets for development had been slower than anticipated by the industry.

"Australia may be a better place to find potential products," she said.