Euronext listed biopharma company Probiodrug AG, a clinical stage developer therapeutics to treat Alzheimer’s disease (AD), has announced that results from its preclinical candidate antibody PBD-06.
Probiodrug said that special emphasis is put on current limitations of immunotherapy of AD and recent strategies to overcome these issues by tailoring the specificity and effector function of the antibodies.
Dr. Stephan Schilling from the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology IZI said the review provides an overview on current strategies to improve immunotherapeutics for the treatment of AD.
Dr. Inge Lues, Chief Development Officer of Probiodrug said that the review highlights the differentiating factors of anti-pGlu3-Abeta immunontherapy over other monoclonal antibodies, providing a comprehensive overview on the mode of action of our development candidate PBD-C06.
Probiodrug is progressing two complementary strategies for tackling pGlu-Abeta with two candidates in development: PQ912, a small molecule inhibitor of Glutaminyl Cyclase, now in Phase 2, and PBD-C06, a pGlu-Abeta-specific monoclonal antibody in preclinical stage.
In the conclusion of the review, the authors said that in spite of several failures of monoclonal antibodies in late-stage clinical studies, these trials have provided an invaluable gain in the understanding of the disease mechanism, supporting the amyloid cascade hypothesis. The first generation of protein drugs still leave significant room for improvement regarding the prevention of side effects and the penetration of the blood–brain
barrier (BBB), the review says.
The improvement of BBB penetration, tailored antibody specificity, and affinity might also finally help to overcome the drawbacks of treatment cost typically associated with passive immunotherapy. In addition, current and future approaches to test combination therapy with Aβ-directed small-molecule drugs promisingly appear to be more effective, safer, and less costly.