4-Antibody, AG (Basel, Switzerland) and Evotec, AG (Hamburg, Germanym) have formed a strategic collaboration to launch a new high-content screening platform for early antibody functionality testing. Both parties agreed to share financial rewards of the collaboration. Evotec will initially pay a USD 2,584,000 access fee to 4-Antibody, which will be fully reimbursed from future returns. Subsequently the parties will share the profits.

Evotec will offer a fully integrated antibody discovery and development service. Evotec’s high throughput and high content screening approach coupled with 4-Antibody’s high-throughput antibody selection approach will allow screening of large and diverse antibody populations for desired functionality and activity at a much earlier stage of selection.

The combined approach is expected to substantially reduce attrition rates at later development stages and is also expected to be particularly beneficial in aiding earlier distinction and selection between antagonist and agonist antibodies.

The new collaboration integrates the output from 4-Antibody’s proprietary high throughput in vitro Retrocyte Display technology for rapid discovery of fully human antibodies into Evotec’s high throughput cell-based assay platform. The Retrocyte Display technology (Retroviral B lymphocyte Display) allows expression and screening of full-length, immunoglobulin antibody libraries in mammalian B-lineage cells for the identification of antigen-specific fully human monoclonal antibodies.

4-Antibody is a biopharmaceutical company with a fully human antibody drug-discovery technology platform, which generates an emerging pipeline of antibody therapeutics.

Evotec is a drug discovery alliance and development partnership company focused on rapidly progressing product approaches with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

Dr. Werner Lanthaler, CEO at Evotec, commented, “Through a combination of our capabilities, we target an approach to select for functional antibodies. This EVOmAb turn-key solution will deliver to our customers a much higher chance to bring an antibody to the market than traditional affinity-selected antibody approaches.”

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4-Antibody
Evotec