Lundbeck turns to shark antibodies to develop new brain drugs
Denmark-based international pharmaceutical company Lundbeck looks to shark antibodies for new possible ways of developing drugs to fight brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, after an early research with privately-owned US biotech firm Ossianix proved to be successful in getting drugs into the brain.
Getting modern large-molecule medicines across the barrier that protects the brain is a major challenge for drug developers.
Sharks, as the most evolutionarily ancient animal species to have an immune system similar to humans, may offer a solution.
The two companies said that Lundbeck had made an undisclosed payment to Ossianix, which has labs in Britain, following experiments in mice showing the effective transfer of potential drugs across the blood-brain barrier.
Ossianix has found a way to attach therapeutic proteins to shark-derived antibodies, allowing treatments to be shuttled across the barrier into the brain where they bind to a drug target.
The technology is still years away from producing a marketed medicine but Lundbeck research head Kim Andersen said it had “significant potential” to benefit patients by delivering antibody-based medicines and other complex drugs into the brain.
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