Atreca (NSDQ: BCEL), IGM Biosciences (NSDQ: IGMS) and BeiGene (NSDQ: BGNE; HK: 06160) formed a three-way collaboration to discover and develop engineered immunoglobulin IgM and IgA antibodies targeting SARS-CoV-2. BeiGene will support clinical development of the product using its global clinical trial team. Because the companies want to deliver a SARS-CoV-2 therapy as soon as possible, they have not established the financial terms of the agreement, leaving that task until later. The companies believe a candidate could be ready to begin clinical testing in the first half of 2021. Atreca is located in South San Francisco, IGM in Mountain View, California, and BeiGene in Beijing.

Atreca’s proprietary discovery platform will generate the sequences of antibodies made by B cells found in blood obtained from acutely infected COVID-19 patients. IGM’s technology platform will develop and manufacture engineered IgM and IgA therapeutic antibodies from the identified sequences.

IGM engineers immunoglobulin M (IgM) and immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies that have a greater number of binding power per antibody than natural immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies. With greater binding power, the engineered antibodies have the potential for activity against a broader range of virus variants compared to traditional IgG antibodies.

The companies also said IgA and IgM antibodies are inherently able to transport from the blood stream to mucosal surfaces, such as in the lung, which may provide a therapeutic advantage for respiratory diseases such as COVID-19.

With 26 potentially registration-enabling trials ongoing and over 60 studies in more than 35 countries, BeiGene has built a 1,100-person global clinical development team for efficient global drug development regulatory submissions.

Atreca and IGM have entered into a Material Transfer and Collaboration Agreement to enable the parties to begin working together immediately.

“Atreca has a history of successfully generating potent, neutralizing antibodies against a number of infectious disease pathogens, and we are proud to join BeiGene and IGM in working to identify a potential therapy to help address this unprecedented international health crisis,” said John Orwin, CEO of Atreca. “We have begun processing samples obtained from acutely infected COVID-19 patients and are focused on analyzing single plasma blast B cells isolated from these samples to identify antibodies targeting potentially novel epitopes that may be missed by other approaches that rely on a specific viral protein to select B cells.”

“Helping patients is core to our mission, and we believe IGM may be the only company in the world that is currently positioned to produce IgM and IgA antibodies with high yield and high quality,” said Fred Schwarzer, CEO of IGM Biosciences. “As such, we feel that we have a responsibility to explore the utility of these antibodies in COVID-19 patients.”

“While the COVID-19 pandemic has presented new challenges to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, equally notable is the desire for international scientific collaboration and cooperation,” said John V. Oyler, Co-Founder, CEO, and Chairman of BeiGene. “We are grateful for the opportunity to lend our global clinical development resources to this critical cause.”

Atreca’s proprietary discovery platform, including its Immune Repertoire Capture® (IRC™) technology, generates bias- and error-corrected, natively paired heavy and light chain sequences of the antibodies expressed by single plasma blast B cells isolated from patient blood samples, enabling analyses of patient antibody repertoires generated in an active immune response in a target agnostic fashion, and permitting selection of antibody sequences for immediate gene synthesis and expression.

IGM’s proprietary platform expands upon the inherent characteristics of IgM and IgA antibodies and enables the rapid development of engineered therapeutics. IGM’s technology allows it to create IgM and IgA antibodies with higher affinity and avidity than naturally occurring IgM and IgA antibodies, and the company has also overcome the historical difficulties in recombinantly expressing and manufacturing IgM and IgA antibodies.

BeiGene discovers and develops novel medicines to improve treatment of diseases worldwide. Its 3,500+ employees in China, the United States, Australia, and Europe are developing a diverse pipeline of novel therapeutics for cancer. BeiGene currently markets two internally-discovered oncology products: BTK inhibitor BRUKINSA™ (zanubrutinib) in the United States, and anti-PD-1 antibody tislelizumab in China.

BeiGene also markets or plans to market in China additional oncology products licensed from Amgen, Celgene and EUSA Pharma.

See our other articles on BeiGene.

Disclosure: none.

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