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Finding The Key To Biopharma Start-Up Antibody-based therapy has been around since the mid-1980s. Since then, there have been thousands of companies that have entered this relatively young area of pharmaceutical enterprise. In the past 10 years, sales of monoclonal antibody-based therapeutics have skyrocketed, growing exponentially over time. For example, in 2006, the five most lucrative antibody-based therapies on the market accounted for over 80% of the revenue generated by the sale of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. Experts forecast that antibody-based drug development will continue to dominate the market for years to come, with sales in excess of $100 billion. Many small antibody therapeutic developers have their own drug discovery platform to design effective antibody-based therapies to attack specific drug targets, but the trend has been for small companies to out-license these platforms (or the drug candidates produced via these platforms) to larger pharma companies. Bottom line: Antibody-based therapeutics is big business, and a number of start-up companies, armed with an effective platform and a classical business model, are making waves in this market. A young company that is rapidly making its mark in the antibody-based therapy business is arGEN-X (Rotterdam, Netherlands). The company’s SIMPLE Antibody platform, based on the active immunization of out-bred llamas, generates full-size antibodies that can prove useful to the therapeutic antibody drug discoverer. First, these full-size antibodies have variable regions indistinguishable in sequence and structure from human antibodies, a feature that facilitates the generation of essentially “fully human” antibodies by simply combining those variable regions with human antibody constant regions. Second, what sets this platform apart from other antibody discovery platforms is that the immune system of llamas can “see” many more sites (epitopes) on human disease targets than those of commonly used mouse systems (BALB/c or transgenic). As a result, the SIMPLE Antibody platform can generate a far greater diversity of antagonistic or agonistic antibodies against all types of human disease targets in a highly productive manner as compared with platforms based on in vitro display libraries or transgenic animals. arGEN-X was founded in 2008 by three experienced and entrepreneurial pharma industry executives: Dr. Hans de Haard, the company’s chief scientific officer and a leading world expert on Camelid immunology; Dr. Torsten Dreier, the company’s chief development officer and a master of preclinical and early clinical antibody product development; and Tim Van Hauwermeiren, MSc, MBA, the company’s CEO. The cofounders have a track record of success in building successful antibody platform and product companies. Prior to cofounding arGEN-X, de Haard helped build two successful antibody developers: Target Quest, which was acquired by therapeutic antibody developer Dyax; then later he helped design the highly successful Nanobody discovery platform at Ablynx, which is currently one of the world’s leading antibody therapeutic developers. Dreier previously worked at German antibody company Micromet, where he held various R&D positions while bringing biopharmaceuticals to the clinic. Van Hauwermeiren has also been involved in several start-up ventures, including Proctor&Gamble and Ablynx where he was involved in business development. In an interview with Life Science Leader, Van Hauwermeiren discussed the history and inner workings of arGEN-X. At The Beginning “The inception of arGEN-X occurred in 2008,” recalls Van Hauwermeiren. “During a meeting with the cofounders de Haard and Dreier, the idea of starting an antibody company was first presented to me. I was very quickly convinced by the strength of the idea and, based on our shared hist Source: http://www.lifescienceleader.com/index.php?option=com_jambozine&layout=article&view=page&aid=4177