Kymab, a company spun out from the Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK to discover, develop and commercialise novel antibody-based medicines, has launched the first commercial strain from its Kymouse antibody-discovery platform.
The Kymouse HK strain is a transgenic mouse designed to produce a diverse repertoire of fully human, heavy/kappa-chain antibodies with high affinity for a broad range of drug targets.According to Kymab, the strain represents “a significant advance” over existing commercial strains currently used in the pharmaceutical industry.
The company will apply Kymouse HK to its own antibody drug-discovery projects while employing a “broad partnering approach” to make the strain available to pharmaceutical companies for use in their discovery programmes.
Kymab was set up in 2009 on the back of research in the field of human immunology and mouse biology conducted at the Sanger Institute (a leading player in the Human Genome Project) in the laboratory of Professor Allan Bradley, director emeritus of the Institute, scientific founder of Kymab and now the company’s chief scientific officer.
