Lonza Signs Biotherapeutics Licensing Agreement with Doer Biologics

Lonza announced on Dec. 8, 2021 that it has entered into a research license agreement with Zhejiang Doer Biologics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, under which Doer may use Lonza’s XS technology for the production of its proprietary platform technology.

According to a company press release, Lonza’s XS Pichia Expression System enables scalable, robust, and reliable expression processes. Doer plans to use the technology to develop, express, and manufacture multi-specific Volatile Halogenated Hydrocarbons (VHH)-based biotherapeutic proteins with the intent of addressing unmet immuno-oncology needs.

“Next-generation therapies always demand a new take on expression systems,” said Peter Droc, head of Licensing and Drug Product Services, Lonza, in the press release. “At Lonza, we have continued developing a toolbox of expression systems that help accommodate industry trends, eliminate production bottlenecks, align downstream processing, and drive breakthroughs in the clinic. Doer Biologics has innovative R&D pipelines for VHH antibodies and we believe this agreement will further accelerate their candidates from pre-clinical study to commercial manufacturing.”

“Designing and developing new multi-specific antibodies represents a central challenge for the realization of new immunotherapies,” said Yanshan Huang, founder and CEO, Zhejiang Doer Biologics, in the press release. “Access to Lonza’s proprietary expression technology will enable us to progress our proprietary MultipleBody and SMART-VHHBody platform by providing high-yielding processes for our candidates. We believe that we can develop high-quality VHH-based multi-specific biotherapeutics in a faster and lower-cost fashion with Lonza’s XS Pichia Expression System.”

Source: Lonza