Compound Therapeutics and Abbott Laboratories Enter into Technology License Agreement for Drug Discovery

WALTHAM, Mass., Sept. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Compound Therapeutics, a Massachusetts-based biotechnology company, announced today that they have entered into a license agreement with Abbott Laboratories granting Abbott non- exclusive rights to use Compound Therapeutics' PROfusion(TM) technology and certain antibody libraries. PROfusion is an in vitro display technology for the selection and rapid optimization of high-affinity antibodies and other binding proteins.

The agreement provides Compound Therapeutics a revenue opportunity and preliminary validation of its technology platform by a pharmaceutical leader. In turn, Abbott enhances its human antibody platform with an emerging technology that may assist in the isolation of antibody leads with tailored specificity, potentially offering important clinical and commercialization advantages.

"Abbott is committed to identifying and evaluating technologies with the greatest potential to augment our antibody discovery technology platform so we can continue to develop innovative antibody therapeutics to address the unmet medical needs of patients," said Alejandro Aruffo, Ph.D., Vice President, Abbott Immunology Research and Development, and president, Abbott Bioresearch Center. "We view access to Compound Therapeutics' PROfusion technology as an important example of our ongoing commitment to build a robust and sustainable antibody platform within Abbott."

"We are very pleased to establish our first PROfusion technology agreement with Abbott, an established leader in human therapeutic antibodies," said Frank Lee, President and Chief Executive Officer of Compound Therapeutics. "We view this agreement as a strong validation of Compound Therapeutics' proprietary technology platform and a demonstration of our ability to quickly leverage our scientific assets as a strategic vehicle to generate revenue. We will aggressively pursue select additional license agreements of this kind to provide additional funding for our drug development pipeline."

Under the terms of the agreement, Abbott receives the right to use the licensed technology and libraries for purposes of drug discovery research directed to the generation of highly potent leads for development and commercialization of human antibody products. Compound Therapeutics will receive an upfront payment, milestone payments contingent upon meeting specified clinical and commercial objectives, and potential royalty payments related to therapeutic antibody products that may result from the license agreement with Abbott.

Compound Therapeutics will provide training and support to Abbott in the use of PROfusion technology, as well as reagents and human antibody libraries useful to practice the PROfusion technology.

About PROfusion(TM) Technology

Compound Therapeutics' proprietary display technology, PROfusion, is the core of its product discovery platform. PROfusion technology, which has been developed and optimized over the past seven years, has a number of significant advantages over conventional protein engineering approaches, including: large diverse protein libraries (>1 trillion) which increase the probability of identifying binding proteins with the desired functional and structural properties; the ability to optimize high affinity binding characteristics against a specific therapeutic target; in vitro development, screening, and optimization of high affinity binding proteins, which avoids in vivo selection limitations; and adaptability to various library/scaffold types.

About Compound Therapeutics

Compound Therapeutics is a privately held biotechnology company developing the next generation of protein antagonist therapeutics. The company has two proprietary product platforms that it applies to a wide range of biological targets; AdNectins(TM) are non-antibody based, highly specific binding proteins, and AdZymes(TM) are novel catalytic protein antagonists. Both platforms offer significant commercial and technical advantages over current technologies, including faster and lower-cost product development, improved product potency and specificity, as well as a strong intellectual property position that includes broad freedom to operate. Compound uses its unique protein display technology, PROfusion(TM), as a powerful tool to generate AdNectins, AdZymes, and other types of protein antagonists. The company is funded by three leading venture capital firms: Atlas Venture, Flagship Ventures, and Polaris Venture Partners.