DARPA-funded leaf company identifies 500+ human antibodies for WuFlu and teams with Eli Lilly (Big Pharma) to create treatments; expects to start testing in patients in four months
https://www.genengnews.com/news/to-develop-coronavirus-treatment-lilly-taps-abcellera-antibody-platform/
To Develop Coronavirus Treatment, Lilly Taps AbCellera Antibody Platform
By Alex Philippidis - March 16, 2020
Within a week of receiving a blood sample from one of the first U.S. patients to recover from COVID-19, AbCellera, a Canadian therapeutic antibody discovery company, put its rapid pandemic response platform to work, identifying more than 500 unique fully human antibody sequences, the largest panel of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies reported to date.
Eli Lilly will partner with Vancouver, BC-based AbCellera to co-develop the most promising of those 500+ antibodies, through a collaboration whose value was not disclosed. The companies will carry out their co-development work after AbCellera taps into the expertise of another partner—the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The Center will assess those antibodies, and find those with the greatest potential against COVID-19 by identifying antibodies that bind the pandemic strain of SARS-CoV-2 the best.
“We are about to find out very quickly which ones of those 500 will be effective neutralizers through our partnership at the Vaccine Research Center,” Ester Falconer, PhD, AbCellera’s Head of Research & Development, told GEN. “We will have that data very quickly, and that will help us down-select a number to develop together with our partners at Lilly for further manufacturing and further testing.”
AbCellera and Lilly committed to equally share initial development costs towards a treatment, after which Lilly has agreed to oversee all further development, manufacturing and distribution. If successful, Lilly said, it will work with global regulators to bring a treatment to patients
Daniel Skovronsky, MD, PhD, Lilly’s chief scientific officer and president of Lilly Research Laboratories, added in a statement: “We’ve partnered with AbCellera because we’re impressed with the speed and quality of their efforts. We are moving at top speed to create a potential treatment to help patients.”
“While typically a new therapeutic antibody program might take years to get in the clinic, our goal with AbCellera is to be testing potential new therapies in patients within the next four months,” Skovronsky added.
Appearing on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” Lilly chairman and CEO David A. Ricks told host Jim Cramer: “We hope to be in a clinical trial this summer.”
DARPA P3 participation
AbCellera developed its pandemic response platform over the past three years through its participation in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Pandemic Prevention Program, also called P3. The four-year, $30 million program was created to establish a robust technology platform for pandemic response capable of developing field-ready medical countermeasures within 60 days of isolation of an unknown viral pathogen, in partnership with NIAID Vaccine Research Center and Ichor Medical Systems.
“Presently, our platform is the world’s best for antibody discovery. And Lilly, a worldwide, well-known pharma company, is one of the top in the world at manufacturing and distribution, so the synergy aligns because AbCellera can find the best antibody,” says Falconer, “but if there’s no one to take those antibodies and help develop them, manufacture them, get them through clinical trials, they’re not going to be useful to the people who need them most.”
AbCellera’s platform can take immune cells from essentially any source with a natural immune system, and isolate the B cells that make antibodies with the therapeutic properties of interest. The cells are loaded into microfluidic devices, which comprise over 150,000 individual reaction chambers, each one of which has a closed volume of about 1 nanoliter.
“In a single day of screening, we can screen through millions of immune cells, and find the best antibodies that will then go on to be developed as therapeutics,” Falconer said. “A single nanoliter volume effectively shrinks down a petri dish millions of times, and in a matter of an hour, a single antibody secreting cell can build up enough concentration in that very tiny volume so that we can actually perform a number of tests for antibody properties.”
[Moar at website]