Astel­las and Twist team up in an­ti­bod­ies; FDA asks DBV for an ad­di­tion­al safe­ty study in peanut al­ler­gy patch

Astel­las will li­cense Twist Bio­science’s VHH an­ti­body li­braries for five years to con­duct R&D, Twist an­nounced Thurs­day. The deal in­cludes an undis­closed up­front pay­ment as well as the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an­nu­al main­te­nance fees, clin­i­cal and com­mer­cial mile­stones and roy­al­ty pay­ments on prod­uct sales.

This is the third col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the two com­pa­nies.

Twist says it has a li­brary of these VHH an­ti­bod­ies, al­so known as nanobod­ies or sin­gle do­main an­ti­bod­ies, which are small­er than reg­u­lar an­ti­bod­ies, mak­ing them bet­ter built for some dis­eases be­cause they can hit tar­gets that tra­di­tion­al ones can’t. The VHH an­ti­bod­ies can sup­port the cre­ation of bi- or mul­ti-spe­cif­ic an­ti­bod­ies to de­vel­op ther­a­pies in on­col­o­gy, au­toim­mune dis­eases and vi­rol­o­gy, ac­cord­ing to Twist.

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