24 Feb 2020 AbCellera partnership to provide next generation therapeutic antibody discovery

February 24, 2020

Today, AbCellera (HQ’d in Vancouver), a leader in antibody drug discovery for human health, is making the company’s first venture into animal health with a founding collaboration with Invetx, a new Boston biotech, and WuXi Biologics.

In this unique three-way collaboration, AbCellera will bring to Invetx, the best-integrated technologies, currently being applied to human antibody drug discovery, to cost-efficiently accelerate the discovery of a pipeline of new drugs to treat animal diseases.

With increased pet ownership, the global animal health market is large and growing, but only a small portion of biotech companies are advancing new therapies for pets, creating a large unmet medical need.

With this foundational collaboration, Invetx announced today a $15 million Series A financing, which will be used to advance the first drug candidate into clinical trials this year and build a pipeline of drug candidates to improve animal health — leveraging AbCellera’s best-in-class antibody drug discovery technologies, Invetx’s human and animal biotech R&D expertise, and WuXi Biologics’ drug development and manufacturing capabilities.

Press release can be found here: LINK

AbCellera’s technologies can rapidly discover large and diverse panels of high-quality antibody drug candidates from any species, making it the platform of choice for innovation in drug discovery.

Since 2015, AbCellera has entered collaborations to discover novel antibodies for human health with top-tier pharma and biotech companies (including Novartis, Pfizer, Teva, Merck, GSK, Sanofi, and Denali). AbCellera is also discovering coronavirus-neutralizing antibodies that could ultimately be deployed to stop transmission of COVID-19.