Fusion Antibodies launches new 'RAMP' platform

Pharmaceutical contract research organisation Fusion Antibodies launched its new ‘Rational Affinity Maturation Platform’ (RAMP) at the Antibody Engineering Conference in San Diego last week, it announced on Monday.

The AIM-traded company said that at the conference, its chief technical officer Dr Richard Buick gave a presentation on RAMP, which included discovery scientists from the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, as well as hosting a number of smaller events.

It described RAMP as its new proprietary service, designed to improve the affinity of therapeutic antibodies being developed by drug discovery companies.

The benefits of improved affinity included improved efficacy of the treatment and the potential for lower dosages, which greatly reduced production costs for the manufacturer and could improve tolerability in the patient, the Fusion board said.

Previous approaches to affinity maturation had been predominantly focused on screening high volumes of randomly produced mutations, while Fusion's solution involved the rational in silico design, which reportedly improved binding and stability of a “much smaller number” of variants from which RAMP enabled selection of a lead drug candidate.

That greatly reduced the laboratory resources and time required, thus accelerating the customer's drug development programme towards clinical trials.

The company confirmed that it had applied for patent protection of the approach to improving efficacy of therapeutic antibodies being developed by its customers.

It said the funds it raised in December last year, at the time of its admission to AIM, had been used to successfully bring the new service to fruition.

RAMP would be offered to the firm’s customers on a fee-for-service basis, with milestone success payments sought where appropriate.

As it had previously announced, the introduction of RAMP was not expected to generate significant revenues in the financial period ending March 2019, but was expected to contribute to the company's growth in the following year.

“Launching this service was one of our goals for IPO so we're delighted it has now been successfully introduced,” said Fusion Antibodies chief executive officer Paul Kerr.