VERAXA and Quadira Enter ADC Development Partnership

VERAXA Biotech GmbH (former Velabs Therapeutics GmbH), an ADC engineering and functional antibody screening company, has entered into a partnership with Quadira Biosciences AG of Zug, Switzerland, to develop a suite of novel ADCs for the treatment of oncological conditions. The collaboration will leverage VERAXA's advanced and proprietary position-true click-chemistry-based drug conjugation technology with Quadira’s 3D cellular assay and assessment systems. The agreement says VERAXA will be entitled to upfront payments and royalties from the worldwide sale of products resulting from the collaboration.

Quadira Biosciences AG is a joint venture between abc biopply AG, a Swiss biotech specializing in the standardization of biological components and complex 3D cell culture systems and Xlife Sciences AG, also a Swiss biotech. Quadira will have exclusive access to abc biopply’s proprietary 3D CoSeedis technology platform, a new standard in the industrial application of 3D cell culture systems for preclinical drug validation.

VERAXA Biotech is a pioneer of microfluidic technology for the ultra-fast screening of functional antibodies. The company has developed superior microfluidic hardware and processes to screen for modulatory mAbs on complex target proteins such as GPCRs. VERAXA combines binding and functional assessment in 1 single step and unravels precious therapeutic hits out of entire immune repertoires that consists of millions of B cells in less than 48 hours. 

Just recently, VERAXA acquired Araxa Biosciences GmbH, a biotech company with innovative and proprietary protein engineering and click-chemistry based drug coupling technologies to expand its preclinical antibody capacities from early screening to later stage antibody engineering and to sharpen its profile in personalized medicine and precision oncology. With the novel ADC technology, VERAXA can perform precise site-specific antibody labeling with almost any drug at any position and highest reproducibility. The company has several ADC in production and testing with superior cytotox profiles as compared to benchmark molecules.  

"This partnership with Quadira is an ideal and fully complementary constellation adding significant value to our top ADC candidate suite by in depths assessment through Quadira’s unmet gold standard 3D assay platform," said Christoph Antz, CEO, VERAXA. "The combination of VERAXA’s first class novel ADC candidates with POC assessment data from our 3D cell culture systems will strongly speed up the whole ADC drug development process. We will generate a suite of best-in-class ADC drug candidates with a significantly de-risked development trajectory and high preclinical maturity," adds Arne Faiss, CEO of both abc biopply and Quadira.