Eisai Licenses EpiVax’s ISPRI Toolkit for Preclinical in silico Immunogenicity Screening
PROVIDENCE, RI, December 20, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — EpiVax, Inc. (“EpiVax”), an internationally recognized leader in the field of immunogenicity, today announced that Eisai Co. Ltd. (“Eisai”) has licensed EpiVax’s ISPRI toolkit for immunogenicity risk assessment of Eisai’s robust biologics pipeline.
The ISPRI toolkit is a secure web-based platform that allows researchers to rapidly assess the immunogenic risk of biologic candidates. The fully integrated computational immunology toolkit can be used to identify sequence regions that could elicit unwanted immune responses and enables developers to re-engineer early-stage candidates to reduce risk. Most notably, ISPRI allows developers to characterize the phenotype of immune response to biologics by identifying both inflammatory and regulatory T cell epitopes in biologic sequences – a distinguishing feature of the platform.
Eisai is a global pharmaceutical company addressing the key therapeutic areas of tropical diseases, oncology, and neurology, with a particular focus on dementia. Eisai’s R&D organization plans to utilize the ISPRI toolkit to screen a wide range of therapeutic modalities, including antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, and non-antibody protein therapeutics.
Dr. Takashi Owa, Eisai’s CSCO said about the new partnership: “We look forward to having an advanced in silico toolkit such as ISPRI at our disposal to better understand and mitigate the immunogenicity of our early-stage biologic drug candidates.”
“We’re eager to enable Eisai with incorporation of rapid, secure, and advanced immunogenicity risk assessment into their drug discovery process,” said EpiVax CEO/CSO, Annie De Groot, MD.
About EpiVax:
A 25-year-old biotechnology company located in Providence, RI, EpiVax is a leader in the field of immunogenicity assessment of vaccines and biologics. EpiVax partners with a global roster of companies, agencies, and academics to accelerate immunogenicity risk assessment by providing access to advanced computational immunology tools for investigations in a number of applications.
About Eisai:
Eisai’s Corporate Concept is “to give first thought to patients and people in the daily living domain, and to increase the benefits that health care provides.” Under this Concept, called human health care, they aim to effectively achieve social good in the form of relieving anxiety over health and reducing health disparities. With a global network of R&D facilities, manufacturing sites and marketing subsidiaries, Eisai strives to create and deliver innovative products targeting diseases with high unmet medical needs, with particular focus in strategic areas of neurology and oncology.
For more information about Eisai, please visit www.eisai.com.
Press Contact:
Sarah Moniz
