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.