The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust each invested $20 million in Kymab, a monoclonal antibody biopharmaceutical company, to enable Kymab to maximize its Kymouse platform and advance its proprietary pipeline of first-in-class therapeutic human monoclonal antibodies in areas of significant unmet medical need, including cancer and inflammation.
Kymab also will collaborate with the Gates Foundation and its partners on vaccine antigen discovery R&D, with an initial focus on malaria and HIV.
Trevor Mundel, president of Global Health, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said, "We are excited to work with Kymab in pursuit of R&D of drugs and vaccines to address diseases that have a disproportionate impact on the world's poorest. We believe Kymab has one of the most comprehensive transgenic technologies to date, capturing the entire human IgG diversity, and are pleased to support the company as it enters its next stage of growth."
Kymab is using the Kymouse transgenic human antibody platform to discover and develop fully human monoclonal antibody drugs. Recent data published in Nature Biotechnology demonstrate that the Kymouse technology yields an antibody library constituted from 100 trillion different antibodies. From this deep library, rare high-quality antibodies can be selected and developed into therapeutics.
Antibodies are one of the best-selling classes of drugs today; five of the top 10 best-selling drugs are antibodies, because antibodies are natural products with exquisite specificity and potency and generally have superior safety profiles. The challenge has been to capture the full human antibody repertoire and to recapitulate all its attributes.
Kymab will seek to enter into a limited number of strategic collaborations to identify and develop therapeutic antibodies in a range of diseases. In addition, Kymab has established Kymab Access, a program that enables academic researchers to pursue the discovery and development of novel human monoclonal antibody therapeutics and vaccines by partnering with Kymab and its Kymouse antibody technology.
