Corporate News & RNS

Fusion Antibodies plc (AIM: FAB), a pharmaceutical contract research organisation specialising in antibody engineering services, announces that its new Rational Affinity Maturation Platform ("RAMP™") was launched at the Antibody Engineering Conference in San Diego last week. At the conference, Dr Richard Buick, Chief Technical Officer of the Company, gave a presentation on RAMP™ to delegates which included discovery scientists from the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, as well as hosting a number of smaller events.

RAMP™ is Fusion's new proprietary service, designed to improve the affinity of therapeutic antibodies being developed by drug discovery companies. The benefits of improved affinity include improved efficacy of the treatment and the potential for lower dosages, which greatly reduces production costs for the manufacturer and may improve tolerability in the patient.

Previous approaches to affinity maturation have been predominantly focused on screening high volumes of randomly produced mutations. Fusion's novel solution involves the rational in silico design, improving binding and stability of a much smaller number of variants from which RAMP™ enables selection of a lead drug candidate. This greatly reduces the laboratory resources and time required, thus accelerating the customer's drug development programme towards clinical trials.

The Company has applied for patent protection of this novel approach to improving efficacy of therapeutic antibodies being developed by its customers. The funds raised by the Company in December 2017, at the time of the Company's admission to AIM, have been used to successfully bring this new service to fruition. 

RAMP™ will be offered to the Company's customers on a fee for service basis, with milestone success payments sought where appropriate. As previously announced, the introduction of RAMP™ is not expected to generate significant revenues in the financial period ending March 2019 but is expected to contribute to the Company's growth in the following year.

Commenting, Paul Kerr, CEO of Fusion Antibodies said: "Launching this service was one of our goals for IPO so we're delighted it has now been successfully introduced."

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About Fusion Antibodies plc

Fusion is a Belfast based contract research organisation ("CRO") providing a range of antibody engineering services for the development of antibodies for both therapeutic drug and diagnostic applications. The Company's ordinary shares were admitted to trading on AIM on 18 December 2017. Fusion provides a broad range of services in antibody generation, development, production, characterisation and optimisation. These services include antigen expression, antibody production, purification and sequencing, antibody humanisation using Fusion's proprietary CDRx™ platform and the production of antibody generating stable cell lines to provide material for use in clinical trials. Since 2012, the Company has successfully sequenced over 250 antibodies and successfully completed over 100 humanisation projects for its international, blue-chip client base. 

The Company was established in 2001 as a spin out from Queen's University Belfast. It was initially a drug development business but revised its operations to focus on CRO work in 2011. The Company has a highly experienced management team with a combined 47 years' experience in the biopharma industry. The global monoclonal antibody therapeutics market, which accounted for 43 per cent. of the global biologics market in 2016, was valued at between $85.4 billion and $86.7 billion in 2015 and is forecast to increase at a CAGR of between 8.2 per cent. and 12.2 per cent. for the period 2016 to 2024.