Novozymes albumin attracts two ‘top 10’ pharmas
The firm – which is a unit of Danish industrial biotechnology group Novozymes – could not name the companies involved, but did reveal that its recombinant human albumin product is being used to extend the circulating half-life of various drug candidates.
Spokesman Dermot Pearson told in-Pharmatechnologist.com the unnamed firms join GSK, CSL, Dyax, EpiVax and Teva on the list of companies using “albumin technology for half-life extension purposes in their drug development programmes.”
Novozymes’ recombinant human albumin - has been available for the last few years – has been modified so that it takes longer to degrade, which is key to its half-life extending properties as Pearson explained.
“We have engineered a range of albumin variants with increased binding to the human FcRn receptor. We have demonstrated that this increase in receptor binding correlates directly with an increased in vivo half-life.
He added that: “The combination of a therapeutic molecule with our albumin variants allows for longer acting therapeutics than was previously possible using wild-type albumin.”
Pearson recently presented data to support this claim describing the findings as “the most promising insight yet that Novozymes' half-life extension technology delivers the reduction in dosing frequency that we set out to deliver when we began developing the platform five years ago.”
