Dive Brief:
- Canadian drugmaker Bioasis Technologies has turned to Chinese CDMO WuXi Biologics for manufacture of the biotech's preclinical cancer biologic, inking a deal to support analytical development and IND-enabling studies.
- Partnering with Wuxi will give Bioasis access to technologies from cell line construction and development through to formulation development. No details of financial terms were released for the deal.
- Bioasis is developing a delivery technology called xB3 that's designed to help medicines cross the blood-brain barrier. The candidate in question for its deal with Wuxi is xB3-001, in development for treatment of brain metastases in HER2+ breast cancer.
Dive Insight:
WuXi has made a number of manufacturing deals this year, including a collaboration to develop hard-to-manufacture antibodies with Adagene. In order to meet the growth in biologics manufacturing, particularly in China, the company has also been busy expanding its biologics production footprint, with a plant in Dundalk, Ireland, and additional single-use bioreactors in Wuxi City, China.
Most recently, the company announced it would invest $60 million to build a biologics production facility in Singapore, its 10th drug substance manufacturing plant.
Deals with CDMOs are particularly important for small- and medium-sized companies, such as Bioasis, with a handful of preclinical projects in their pipelines.
Bioasis grew out of research from the University of British Columbia, and it claims its xB3 technology has the potential to transport biologics (think monoclonal antibodies or enzymes) as well as small molecules across the blood-brain barrier. This would enable the company to turn non-brain-penetrating therapeutics into drugs that could target diseases in the brain.
In addition to xB3-001, the pipeline includes xB3-002, in development for glioblastoma, and the xB3-007 program, aimed at a range of neurodegenerative diseases.