Harbour Biomed, together with COVID-19 partners Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center, formed a new collaboration with two other Dutch entities, Viroclinics-DDL and Kiadis Pharma (Euronext: KDS) to develop a combination of a mAb and Natural Killer (NK) cells to treat COVID-19. Kiadis' K-NK cell therapy platform has shown activity against SARS-CoV-2 in laboratory tests. In addition, COVID-19 has been shown to break down NK cell immunity, while patients with severe COVID-19 lack functional NK cells.

Harbour is headquartered in Boston, with discovery operations in Rotterdam and R&D labs in Suzhou.

Harbour and its initial Dutch collaborators are developing 49F1, a fully human, non-blocking antibody that targets a conserved region of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. It has shown strong binding affinity to both SARS-CoV-2 and a second coronavirus SARS-CoV in vitro.

The company's new collaboration will study the elimination of SARS-CoV-2 virus and virally infected cells by K-NK cells, and synergies between mAbs and NK cells.

NK cells are the human immune system's first line of defense against tumor cells and infectious disease. K-NK-ID101 cells may have enhanced anti-viral activity, without causing needless inflammation, and therefore may be uniquely suited to repair this lack of functional NK cells. Since K-NK-ID101 cells can be manufactured at large scale and then frozen, they can be made available globally to patients.

"This innovative collaboration with Kiadis allows us to explore potential synergies between the innate and adaptive immunity," said Dr. Jingsong Wang, Founder, Chairman & CEO of HBM. "It further underscores the multi-pronged approaches HBM and our partners are taking to address the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic using Harbour Mice^® platforms and other next-generation technologies to accelerate the development of novel human antibodies," he added.  

Harbour BioMed is a global, clinical stage biopharmaceutical developing immuno-oncology, immunologic and COVID-19 treatments. Its internal discovery programs are centered around its two patented transgenic mouse platforms (Harbour Mice^®) for generating both fully human monoclonal antibodies, heavy chain only antibodies (HCAb) and HBICE™ immune cell engager technology for developing bispecific antibodies.

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Disclosure: none.