Immunology company Agenus Inc. has acquired XOMA Corporation’s antibody pilot plant manufacturing facility and antibody technology capabilities for $6 million. Additionally, Agenus obtained an exclusive license to a phage display library from IONTAS, and entered into an agreement for cell line development technology with Selexis. The company says these new capabilities, in combination with its Retrocyte Display and SECANT yeast display platforms, will result in a broad, vertically integrated in-vitro antibody discovery and production platform.

The acquisition of XOMA’s facility will enable Agenus to manufacture checkpoint modulator (CPM) antibodies to meet its growing GMP antibody production requirements for development and future clinical trials.

“We look forward to working with the team currently at the XOMA facility and welcoming them to Agenus. With these three transactions, we will have assembled one of the most comprehensive and integrated capabilities in the industry,” said Garo Armen, chairman and chief executive officer, Agenus. “These capabilities provide us with unique advantages in an era where quality, efficiencies and speed of development and commercialization are paramount to successfully developing a new generation of biopharmaceutical products. Our goal is to bring highly effective novel therapies to patients while addressing the burden of rising healthcare costs.”

According to the company, the Selexis collaboration will offer it advantages in the creation of high expressing and stable master cell lines needed for antibody manufacturing. In addition, the transaction with IONTAS strengthens its approaches to developing and optimizing antibodies as potential new medicines.

“We can now apply a highly effective suite of approaches that have the advantage of incorporating three complementary display technologies for discovering antibodies with superior pharmacological and pharmaceutical characteristics,” said Robert Stein, chief scientific officer, Agenus. “At Agenus, we integrate the use of these display platforms with innovative computational, structured-based design approaches to discover and optimize potential best-in-class monoclonal antibodies as future medicines. Our partnership with IONTAS will be a unique opportunity to collaborate with John McCafferty, a pioneer of the Phage Display approach and one of the world’s leading experts in its use for discovery of therapeutic antibodies. Separately, the addition of the Selexis cell line development capabilities and the XOMA antibody pilot plant will allow us to advance our broad and growing CPM portfolio into clinical studies with greater speed, quality, and control.”