Company Profile
Monoclonal antibody therapy is already accepted as a preferred route for the treatment for a number of inflammatory diseases and there is impressive progress in the treatment of cancer. With many FDA approved monoclonal antibodies on the market and many more new antibody based medicines in clinical trials, the impact of antibody therapy on the management of human disease promises to be huge, with sales of medicines derived from human or humanised antibodies estimated to be well over $30 billion by 2010.
Monoclonal antibodies or variants thereof will represent a high proportion
of new medicines launched in the 21st century.
Most chimeric, humanized, and fully human therapeutic antibodies comprise heavy and light chains. Most are now derived from transgenic mice capable of producing such antibodies (H2L2) in response to antigen challenge. Recent M&A activity and constraints imposed by intellectual property threaten to restrict the development and launch of antibody based medicines. Hence there remains a need for novel routes to generate human antibodies and antibody based complexes.
Harbour Antibodies is exploiting transgenic mouse antibody platforms for the production of different types of antibodies, conventional antibodies, heavy chain only antibodies and VH domain complexes.
Harbour Antibodies is developing:
Transgenic mice for the derivation of conventional human antibodies (H2L2) comprising two heavy and two light chains, following antigen challenge
Transgenic mice for the derivation of human heavy chain only antibodies and camelised human heavy chain only antibodies (HCAbs). These HCAbs comprise heavy chain dimers and are devoid of light chain.
Harbour Antibodies has shown that:
Human HCAb dimers are soluble, not prone to aggregation, less complex to manufacture than H2L2 tetramers and may provide an alternative to H2L2 antibody based platforms for the development of new medicines, diagnostics and reagents.
Soluble antigen specific VH domains derived from HCAbs form the basis of easily engineered second generation VH domain antibody complexes, molecules which have proved difficult to derive from H2L2 antibodies.
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Harbour Antibodies