On Sept. 9, 2019, IRBM announced the signing of a service and development agreement with The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The agreement focused on the development of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies against a novel immune checkpoint target.

IRBM worked with MD Anderson’s Oncology Research for Biologics and Immunotherapy Translation (ORBIT) platform, part of the institution’s Therapeutics Discovery division focused on therapeutic antibody development. The parties collaborated to identify and validate lead antibodies through the pre-clinical proof of concept studies.

IRBM’s human antibody discovery platform can rapidly identify and optimize high-quality antibodies, which can be explored and developed as novel therapeutics. IRBM planned to utilize its proprietary phage-display antibody libraries and immuno-oncology capabilities to generate and optimize fully human antibody candidates against the undisclosed target. Thereafter, MD Anderson had options to continue clinical development of selected antibodies through later clinical stages.