Crescendo Biologics expands Takeda collaboration

Cambridge, UK-based Crescendo Biologics will expand its discovery and development collaboration with Japanese pharma company Takeda, which is focused on building Humabody-based therapeutics against undisclosed targets.

The expanded collaboration comes following Crescendo’s achievement of its sixth technical milestone within the original collaboration agreement.

The expansion will enable Takeda to access a range of Crescendo’s half-life extension Humabodies for use with its two Humabody programmes, licensed in November 2018 and July 2019.

Crescendo added in a statement that it has successfully delivered novel oncology targeted Humabody lead molecules using its in-house discovery process.

The UK firm describes its Humabody products as ‘a novel class of small, robust and potent protein therapeutics based on fully human VH domain building blocks’.

Compared to full antibodies, Humabodies have differentiated pharmacological properties: they are small and can rapidly penetrate and accumulate in tissue/tumours whilst clearing quickly from circulation to minimise systemic toxicity, Crescendo added.

“Crescendo has again demonstrated its ability to deliver differentiated Humabody molecules against specific targets selected by Takeda, on schedule. The expansion of our collaboration, together with the achievement of this sixth milestone, further validates the excellent work being done at Crescendo to progress the next generation of differentiated cancer therapies,” said Theodora Harold, chief executive officer of Crescendo.

“Our fruitful collaboration with Crescendo continues to show great progress. We are delighted to expand our work together, drawing on Takeda’s vast oncology drug discovery experience and Crescendo’s expertise in developing optimally constructed Humabody molecules to quickly advance novel therapeutics with transformative treatment potential towards the clinic,” added Loïc Vincent, Head, Oncology Drug Discovery Unit, Takeda.