Numab Earns Milestone Payment from Sucampo

Numab AG, a Swiss biotech company focused on the discovery and development of innovative antibody-based therapeutics, announces the successful selection of an antibody fragment lead as part of its ongoing multi-target collaboration with Sucampo AG. The achievement of this milestone triggered a CHF 3 million success payment to Numab under the collaboration agreement with Sucampo AG concluded and announced on September 8, 2011.
 
The selected antibody fragment constitutes the first part of an innovative bi-specific therapeutic designed to selectively interfere with disease pathogenesis through a novel mechanism of action. The molecule is intended to be applied by the topical route.
 
David Urech, CSO, co-CEO and co-founder of Numab, commented: “The throughput of our proprietary technology allowed us to select from several hundreds of diverse high-affinity antibodies. Only one year after the initiation of the project, we presented to Sucampo a selection of six highly potent and stable antibody fragment leads with low picomolar affinities, each of which met all the predefined pharmacological and biophysical success criteria”. Oliver Middendorp, CBO, co-CEO and co-founder of Numab added: “This achievement presents an important corporate milestone. It demonstrates Numab’s ability to rapidly deliver innovative antibody-based products and to reliably perform under collaboration agreements”.
 
Numab is a privately-owned Swiss biotech company located in Wädenswil, Zurich. The Company is managed by an experienced team and applies its breakthrough antibody discovery technology to fuel its own pipeline and the pipelines of its partners in the pharmaceutical industry with innovative antibody-based therapeutics. The company was founded in 2011 and received the CTI start-up label in 2012.