Scientific Platform
Zyngenia has developed a Zybody™ platform technology that serves as the foundation for the company’s drug development efforts. Zybodies are single-protein combination therapeutics.
While monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have proven to be very successful drugs that allow highly selective modulation of an antigen target and have additional effector activities as well as intrinsically long half-lives that contribute to their overall therapeutic activity, they have limitations. Traditional mAbs target single antigens whereas diseases are often caused by multiple components or pathways that cannot be fully addressed through a single specificity. Currently, physicians often use combinations of individual mAbs and/or other classes of drugs to treat disease, but this has significant regulatory, developmental and economic hurdles. Zyngenia’s solution is to engineer a single molecule therapeutic (known as a Zybody™) that has the desired properties of a mAb but is able to simultaneously target several known mediators of a disease and – through this – allow for better disease intervention with the cost and development paradigm of a single agent.
In addition to creating more potent and broadly acting therapeutics, this technology will allow us to also create exquisitely selective molecules that are able to recognize subsets of cells that cannot be selectively recognized by conventional mAbs that only have a single specificity.
Finally, unlike the current bi-functional mAb formats under development at several biotechnology companies, Zyngenia’s technology is designed to allow the generation of multi-specific molecules that include, but also expand beyond bi-specificity. Since the technology is based on intact antibodies, Zyngenia believes that the molecules generated will possess desirable effector and pharmacokinetic properties that are mediated through the Fc regions.