Collaborative research agreement
MRC Technology, the commercialisation arm of the UK Medical Research Council, signed a collaborative research agreement to humanise a mouse antibody under development with Ginkgo Biomedical Research Institute of Tokyo, Japan, for the treatment of the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus.
MRC Technology’s Therapeutic Antibody Group will use its proprietary humanisation technology to generate the antibody in a deal initiated and brokered by Summit Pharmaceuticals International, which represents it in Japan. Ginkgo will pay MRC Technology an up-front fee, milestone payments, and royalties, retaining all development and commercialisation rights to the antibody. Additional financial terms were not disclosed.
The antibody targets ILT7, immunoglobulin-like transcript 7, a cell-surface receptor that is expressed selectively in human dendritic cells, which play a critical role in controlling virus infection and have also been implicated in autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus.
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