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aTyr Pharma and its Hong Kong Subsidiary, Pangu BioPharma, Achieve Milestones for First Year of Government Grant to Develop Bispecific Antibody Platform
Two-year grant awarded by the Hong Kong Government’s Innovation and Technology Commission is funding the development of new bispecific antibodies targeting
About this update from Atyr Pharma, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"Two-year grant awarded by the Hong Kong Government’s Innovation and Technology Commission is funding the development of new bispecific antibodies targeting NRP2\nSAN DIEGO, May 12, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- aTyr Pharma, Inc. (Nasdaq: LIFE), a biotherapeutics company engaged in the discovery and development of innovative medicines based on novel biological pathways, today announced that the company’s Hong Kong subsidiary, Pangu BioPharma Limited (Pangu), together with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), have achieved the milestones set forth for the first year of a $750,000 grant received from the Hong Kong Government’s Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC). The two-year project, which is in part funded by the ITC’s Partnership Research Program (PRP), is intended to develop a high-throughput platform for the development of bispecific antibodies with an initial focus on diseases in which Neuropilin-2 (NRP2) overexpression is strongly implicated, including cancer. Key milestones achieved for the first year of the project included building out a highly skilled research team to establish an innovative antibody discovery platform at HKUST. An integral part of this project was the development and implementation of a novel single-cell antibody discovery approach which has so far yielded numerous candidate high-affinity NRP2/co-receptor antibodies that are currently being screened in functional assays. The second year of the project aims to identify the most productive pairings, optimize mid-scale production/purification and prioritize lead candidate bispecific antibodies based on activity in therapeutically relevant cell-based assays. “We are very pleased with the progress of Pangu and HKUST in the first year of this important project,” said Sanjay S. Shukla, M.D., M.S., President and Chief Executive Officer of aTyr. “We continue to learn more about NRP2 as a target for diseases, including immunology and cancer. Based on its role in regulating inflammatory responses and interaction with various co-receptors, we believe there are several potential options to therapeutically target NRP2 and that bispecific antibodies present a unique approach to create highly-specific agonists of this system which may be therapeutically relevant in certain disease states. We look forward to the outcome from the second year of t...