4-antibody

The company 4-Antibody is located in Basel and (as the name suggests) develops antibodies. They have a patented Retrocyte display, which lets them screen full length, native antibodies expressed in pre-B cells. A major advantage of the technology is they have the patent on the system, leaving full freedom to operate (ie no external licensing to be negotiated). 4-Antibody is located in the Technology Park Basel, home to a few companies including the biotech company NBE-Therapeutics. This company was just founded in 2012 by Ulf Grawunder, who was an original co-founder of 4-Antibody and left at the end of 2011.

In addition to their own pipeline, 4-Antibody has both commercial and academic partners and it is with their academic partner, the University of Erlangen in Germany, that they have their most advanced antibody in the pipeline, one against human Cytomegalovirus. Furthermore, 4-Antibody has expanded their discovery opportunities with a collaboration with Evotek announced this year. Together they have combined to offer an integrated antibody discovery and development service for companies that might wish to out-source their antibody discovery.

4-Antibody isn't the only company with a strategy to develop antibodies against targets as a service. GlycoFi (sold to Merck) had a similar strategy but using yeast that have been engineered with a more human glycosylation system. Adimab, another company using yeast display also provides antibodies to a company such as Arsanis.

Covagen

Covagen is a small, private company, located in Schlieren, close to Zurich in the Bio-Technopark  and was founded in 2007 by Dr. Dragan Grabulovski and Dr. Julian Bertschinger.

Covagen is using the ‘alternative scaffold’ based on the human Fyn SH3 domain which they call Fynomers. Fynomers are part of the next step in drug development, an attempt to shrink the size of antibodies while at the same time maintaining high specificity and affinity. Development of this alternative scaffold started in the Prof. Dr. Dario Neri group at ETH. ETH is one of two Swiss federal technical Universities and also home of another alternative scaffold, the DARPins from Prof. Dr. Andreas Plückthun which have been spun off to Molecular Partners, also in the same Bio-Technopark.

Anyway, back to Covagen and Fynomers. With such a small domain, it is easy to string several together and development multi-specific binders, which is exactly what they have done with their bispecific TNF/IL-17A inhibitor.  In December of 2011 they moved forward into preclinical development with this compound.

Three dimensional SH3 structure. Image generated from 4AFQ in the pdb database using PyMol.

Welcome!

Welcome to my Swiss Biotech blog! I'm currently working in Switzerland, interested in biotech and looking to brush up on my knowledge of the field. Hence this blog. Here I intend to put what I learn about Swiss companies, jobs you can get in biotech, funding, and other related topics.

So without further ado, I start working on my second post!