Article Excerpt:
TWST: Would you give us a brief historical sketch of the company and a picture of the things that you are doing at the present time?Dr. Young: Thank you very much for inviting us back to tell our story. We had a breakout year since our last update. We said that we were going to execute on our new dual-pronged business plan of partnering our platform technology and out-licensing early stage antibodies derived from that platform. We have successfully executed on that plan. We entered into a three-year funded R&D deal with Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and we out-licensed one of our antibody programs to the premier anti-cancer antibody company, Genentech. In each case there were upfront payments, future payments based on milestone achievement, and royalties on sales of licensed antibodies. On the heels of these validating business development successes, we hit a couple of other milestones. We raised almost $30 million, $27 million of it in a private placement and $2.3 million in convertible debt. We also listed on the senior Canadian exchange, the Toronto Stock Exchange (ticker symbol ARI on the TSX), because of meeting the listing requirements on the strength of our balance sheet and being named one of the top 50 companies of the TSX Venture Exchange. We have a strong cash position, committed investors, a robust pipeline, and a track record of meeting milestones. Now we are in a position to move several of our programs into clinical development and take the next steps in building a great cancer company. Now I've brought you up to date on last year's progress, let me talk about the company a little. ARIUS Research is a discovery and development company solely focused on functional anti-cancer antibodies. This is the sweet spot of the cancer drug business where blockbusters like RituxanŽ are racking up US$3 billion in yearly sales, HerceptinŽ is clocking US$1.6 billion, and AvastinŽ is bringing in US$1.3 billion in only its second year. We use our FunctionFIRSTTM technology platform to discover naked antibody drugs. The technology is rooted in the fundamental premise that when you're discovering a cancer drug, the primary property that you're screening for is, "Does the cancer drug kill cancer cells, stop their growth, and not affect the normal cells in the same way?" The way that we go about doing that is we take human tumors, which have the cancer epitopes needed for antibody generation, and we create antibodies using the hybridoma technique. Where we are significantly unique is that we screen those antibodies in a cell-killing assay against the cancer cells and normal cells. The only antibodies that we are interested in are those that will kill cancer cells and don't damage normal cells. The difference between this technology and other approaches is that everybody else looks for antibodies that bind to a target. They will try to choose a molecule that they think is important in cancer and derive antibodies that bind very tightly to it, that have high affinity, or high avidity or great specificity. And then, downstream, they will look to whether those antibodies actually affect cancer cells. Whereas we keep the highly effective antibodies and discard everything else, other technologies keep the antibodies that bind. If those binding antibodies happen to have anti-cancer activity, that's great, but it will be a rare event because a lot of potentially valuable antibodies have already been abandoned. We take the opposite approach of looking for effective antibodies first and then determining their binding properties later. The other thing that we do that's very different is we take our antibodies and put them into proof-of-principle animal models of cancer very quickly. We are trying to get through all the necessary gates for clinical development early on. In other words, we are filtering out all those antibodies that can't meet clinical development hurdles in favor of the ones that can. So if the antibodies in test tubes - in vitro - can selectively kill cancers, then we want to show in the animal model that antibody treatment leads to depressed tumor growth or extended survival in human cancer models. This is because we know that, eventually, in the clinic, those are the parameters that we are looking for. Therefore tumor cell growth inhibition and survival end points are the most important criteria for selecting winning antibodies. We'll spend a lot more time and effort on the early antibody candidates that pass these tests. If they don't, obviously, we'll discard them. That's one of the reasons why we have a very robust pipeline of highly potent antibodies - by being very selective. We let each and every antibody compete against every other antibody, and then we are able to cherry pick the best of the class. We now have about 350 antibodies in our library. The next stage in the internal development of these antibodies is to determine our freedom-to-operate for these antibodies prior to humanization or chimerization. We determine the identity of each antibody's target by using classic biochemistry. During the process, we will patent both the antibody and the target epitopes to lock in the economic advantage early on. We put a data package together that includes information about how many different types of cancers each antibody is expected to target, to what degree the targets are expressed on each type of cancer, as well as how these antibodies kill - such as by triggering cell suicide - apoptosis - or by bringing in the body's own defense mechanisms like using ADCC or complement. Once we figure all that out, we have a solid understanding of each aspect of a given antibody program to make decisions. For the antibodies that make it through, we have sufficiently strong science and intellectual property to take it forward to the clinic. We actually have a number of these programs now.
Tickers included in this excerpt: ARI:TSX
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