Abmaxis Achieves Milestone in Collaboration With Merck

Abmaxis, Inc. has announced that it has achieved a major milestone under its collaboration agreement with Merck & Co., Inc.

Under the terms of the agreement, Abmaxis was to optimize an undisclosed Merck human monoclonal antibody for potential therapeutic use.

The Abmaxis team has re-engineered Merck's human monoclonal antibody and improved antibody affinity 70-fold while retaining its specificity, triggering a milestone payment from Merck.

“It has been a rewarding experience for the Abmaxis team to work with Merck on this technically challenging project and this achievement demonstrates the advantages of our Abmaxis in-silico Immunization (AISIM™) technology platform over conventional antibody engineering technologies,” said Peter Luo, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer of Abmaxis.

“The results we were able to achieve for Merck are an important validation of our structure-centric approach towards antibody engineering,” added Shirley Clayton, President and Chief Executive Officer.

“It would be a challenge to the conventional sequence-centric antibody engineering approach to achieve such a significant improvement.”