ThermoGenesis Announces Publishing of Results of ImmuneCyte’s Licensed Neutralizing Antibody Therapeutics for COVID-19

ThermoGenesis Holdings, Inc. (Rancho Cordova, CA, USA) has announced that the results of its joint venture ImmuneCyte Life Sciences, Inc.’s (Irvine, CA, USA) licensed, fully human neutralizing antibody therapeutics for COVID-19 have been published.

ImmuneCyte’s research partner, the Institute of Biomedical Sciences and School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University, has published the results in an article entitled, “Cross-neutralization antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and RBD mutations from convalescent patient antibody libraries,” in bioRxiv on June 6, 2020. In the published report, the research teams from the Institute of Biomedical Sciences and School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University and Key Laboratory for Drug Evaluation and Clinical Research at Zhejiang University School of Medicine have described the process of generation of antibody libraries from 17 different COVID-19 recovered patients with high antibody titers.

After three rounds of screening from phage display libraries, 456 positive clones were obtained with high binding affinity to the receptor binding domain of spike-1 glycoprotein (S1-RBD) of SARS-CoV-2. The positive clones were sequenced and reconstituted into whole human IgG for a series of rigid testing. In the end, four fully human monoclonal antibodies demonstrated single digit nanomole IC50 efficacy range. Consistently, these antibodies effectively neutralized viral entry into several human cell lines. In human Vero-E6 cells, these antibodies can effectively block the entry of live SARS-CoV-2 into cells at only 12.5 nM, indicating their strong drug-like properties. Most importantly, these four neutralizing antibodies can also strongly bind with mutant SARS-CoV-2 strains, suggesting a broad therapeutic application to SARS-CoV-2 and its mutants in this global pandemic. ImmuneCyte has acquired the global intellectual property rights to the four high-affinity neutralizing antibody drug candidates against the COVID-19 virus and intends to advance these antibodies as therapeutics in human clinical trials.

“The research team at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences and School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University, led by Dr. Minyao Liu, is among the leading research groups in the field, and we are thrilled to work with them to develop cutting-edge therapeutics against COVID-19,” said Chris Xu, Ph.D, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ThermoGenesis and Chairman of ImmuneCyte. “The importance of these four neutralizing antibodies, which also strongly bind with mutant COVID-19 viral strains, suggests their strong potential to become effective therapeutic agents against COVID-19 and its mutants causing the global pandemic.”

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