Radiant BioTherapeutics — utilizing multabodies to transform antibody therapeutics
We are pleased to announce that a company that we created, Radiant Biotherapeutics, is emerging out of stealth with the announcement of $8M in seed investment and two validating partnerships with global pharmaceutical companies. We believe that the company is building a world-leading, next generation antibody platform that will unlock new applications for multispecific therapeutics by combining it with multivalency.
Amplitude creates, builds and grows world-leading innovative precision medicine companies and Radiant is a fantastic example of our strategy. We seek out innovative companies that have the potential to be best in class, with a particular focus on Canadian innovation. Our process is to constantly search for and identify innovative scientific research and the creation of Radiant was part of that search effort.
We created Radiant in 2020 based on foundational innovation from Drs Jean-Phillipe Julien and Bebhinn Treanor, PIs at the Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto respectively. As part of our company creation efforts at Amplitude, we were the initial management team to get the company launched and to set the early operating plan. We targeted several key individuals to be early hires, most notably, Dr. Jo Hulme to lead the scientific efforts and Dr. Jeanne Magram to the Board of Directors. Both had recently worked at Northern Biologics and we were impressed with their expertise and the strong cultural fit for what we were trying to build. After nailing the first set of validating experiments, we rounded out the seed team with Art Fratamico, who joined as CEO. Art brings a breadth of experience in strategic deal making, a critical skill for a company that has such a broad platform.
Radiant has built a first-of-its-kind multibody platform that combines stronger binding power with multi-specific target engagement to deliver highly effective antibodies that extend beyond what’s currently available today. The platform has demonstrated the ability to create multi-functional biologics that can tackle a variety of diseases including cancer, autoimmune conditions and infectious diseases.
Building the next generation of antibody-based therapeutics
Monoclonal antibodies, particularly IgG, have become a mainstay of our current treatment armamentarium. To date, there have been over 130 approved antibodies, and many countless more that have been trialled with limited success — most likely due to complexities of biology that limit therapeutic efficacy. However, this work has created a volume of knowledge — particularly around manufacturing, developability and engineering — which is a great jumping board to develop the next generation of IgG-based antibody like therapeutics
As our knowledge of disease-causing mechanisms evolve, our view is that simply binding to a disease-implicated antigen will be insufficient to generate differentiated treatment responses and new drugs. Rather, novel approaches — such as target agonism, receptor clustering, or sweeping away the disease milieu — will be required to drive a therapeutic response. Additionally, we view that the era of monospecific approaches is coming to an end, and multispecific approaches where the targeting of two or more disease-implicated antigens will drive the next way of therapies.
Monoclonal antibodies are incapable of such tasks.
While bispecifics are theoretically able to do so, they are limited by monovalency for each targeting arm, therefore requiring high affinity on each arm in order to have binding, potentially limiting the target space to those targets where high affinity antibodies can be developed. This is the same issue that the majority of current multispecific approaches face, where valency is traded for generating more target breadth.
We felt that while multispecificity alone was insufficient — and that multivalency — i.e. the ability to have multiple binding arms against the same target could solve for the affinity problem, unlocking new target space. Additionally, the novel approaches we described earlier will require both multispecificity and multivalency.
Radiant’s approach — the Multabody — was designed with these goals in mind. Multabodies are designed to be both multispecific AND multivalent — while still being built on a standard IgG framework, making them unique among the currently expanding multi-specific therapeutic class.
In data we have generated to date, our thesis has proven out. Multabodies can target receptors either directly or through receptor clustering approaches with significant efficacy improvements over off-the-shelf antibody approaches both in vitro and in vivo and significantly improve efficacy against antibody cocktails. Data we have generated has allowed us to partner with two global pharmas, where their standard monoclonals approaches had limited efficacy that were significantly enhanced by being converted into a Multabody format.
Another example of Amplitude’s precision medicine focus:
We’re extremely pleased to see this company start from an idea on a napkin to a platform company that has the potential to revolutionize the antibody space and how diseases are treated. Radiant perfectly fits into our precision medicine thesis of investing in ground-breaking Canadian innovation and growing the company to bring new and exciting treatments to patients.
With a novel Multabody platform, several potential best-in-class programs, a great management team and several partnerships with global pharma companies, Radiant has positioned itself to be a revolutionary antibody company in the years to come.
We are thrilled to bring this exciting Canadian innovation forward and advance novel therapies for patients.
***
About Amplitude Ventures
Amplitude Ventures deploys a growth model that has successfully been used to build Canadian companies with world-class management teams and scale companies to breakout potential. Amplitude, with offices in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, has ~$500M in AUM and applies a proven, evidence-based approach to investing in leading Canadian and global precision medicine companies.
About Radiant Biotherapeutics
Radiant Biotherapeutics is a revolutionary antibody platform company leading the new frontier of multi-valent, multi-specific therapeutics to deliver transformative therapies for patients. The proprietary Multabody platform leverages avidity and multi-specificity simultaneously, to generate highly efficacious Multabodies with superior potency than other antibody platforms. These powerful Multabodies have potential to deliver a new class of biologics to tackle complex, heterogenous diseases, such as cancer, that often have challenging targets and mechanisms. Multabody production and manufacturing is flexible, modular and scalable, and leverages standard antibody CMC processes. The groundbreaking efficiency of the platform is driving a novel pipeline of mono-, bi- and tri-specific biologics in multiple therapeutics areas. Strategic partnerships with two leading biopharmaceutical companies validate the platform and its broad scientific and clinical utility. For more, visit radiantbio.com.
