Funding
AbCheck s.r.o., of Plzen, Czech Republic, announced an antibody discovery deal with Eli Lilly and Company, in a move which provides the first validation of the company’s technology and business approach.
Under the agreement, AbCheck will use its three antibody discovery libraries to deliver high-affinity, fully-human antibodies against an undisclosed number of Lilly targets. The three distinct human antibody libraries comprise a total of about 10 billion sequentially and structurally diverse antibodies.
Lilly, which has full rights to any antibodies selected, will pay AbCheck discovery fees and development milestone payments. Other financial and deal terms are not disclosed.
“This discovery deal with Lilly is an important validation of our antibody discovery and business approach,” said Volker Lang, Managing Director of AbCheck. “Signing our first deal with such a significant company so soon after setting up AbCheck, has certainly given us a tremendous boost of confidence that AbCheck is following a successful business strategy.”
AbCheck's libraries are designed as universal tools for the isolation of antibodies against all possible targets. This breadth of targets differentiates the libraries from immunised libraries, which are restricted to only a minor fraction of therapeutically interesting target antigens.
AbCheck was founded in 2009 as a spin-off of Affimed Therapeutics AG and is headquartered within the technology park in Plzen, Czech Republic. Affimed itself was founded in 2000 as a spin-out from the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg.
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