Nona Biosciences and ModeX Therapeutics partner for antibodies discovery

HBM’s wholly owned subsidiary Nona Biosciences has entered an agreement with OPKO Health’s ModeX Therapeutics for the discovery of antibodies.

ModeX Therapeutics will gain access to the fully human Harbour Mice platforms of Nona Bioscience for integration into its MSTAR platform to expedite the monoclonal antibodies’ discovery.

This is expected to significantly shorten the preclinical antibody therapeutics development process.

ModeX’s MSTAR platform has been designed to layer the multispecific functionality onto industry-standard antibody designs to enable a broad range of disease applicability and functionality.

It helps to quickly generate candidates that target up to six distinct biological pathways in one molecule.

The modular design of the platform enables quick testing of many combinations of antigen-binding domains for targeting multiple sites.

This maximises specificity and improves therapeutic efficacy while minimising off-target effects.

Nona Biosciences chairman Jingsong Wang stated: “We are delighted to enter into this collaboration with ModeX Therapeutics.

“We believe that our discovery platforms are highly complementary to ModeX’s approach and are pleased to be able to offer a solution with the potential to speed the discovery of antibodies that ModeX can leverage in multispecific research and development.”

The partnership aims to use the unique strengths of each company to drive the discovery of treatments.

ModeX chief scientific officer John Mascola stated: “We look forward to partnering with Nona Biosciences to accelerate and enhance our discovery of novel multispecific antibody constructs that our team can advance into clinical development”.