News & ANAlysis disadvantages—particularly with regard to shorter half-lives and poorer potency than full-length antibodies—were hard to overlook. For Tillman Gerngross, who founded Adimab in 2007 when new antibody formats were still all the rage, much of the early interest in the alternative formats “was driven by IP [intellectual property] considerations” rather than biological ones. New formats attracted attention if only because they might enable companies to avoid the cost of licensing monoclonal antibody IP. That cost wasn’t nominal: Roche and Genentech’s Cabilly patents, covering a critical step in the production of monoclonal antibodies, earned US $840 million in licensing fees in 2017, the year before they expired.

But for new platforms to sidestep IP considerations, entrepreneurs still needed to show that they could deliver safe and effective biologics. And to prove this capability as quickly as possible, companies typically first went after known targets. For Abylnx that meant targeting TNF, a target that was also accessible to full-length antibodies.“We chose TNF because the target was validated and everything was available—the animal models, the assays, etc. It was the quickest way,” says the company’s founding CEO Mark Vaeck, who held that position until 2006 and is currently CEO of the cell-penetrating peptides company Complix.“We made great inhibitors,” he adds. Other companies with alternative antibody technologies pursued similar strategies to avoid stacking target risk on top of technology risk.“You could say that’sa mistake, but we all had investors and boards to take into account and we had to work within certain financial boundaries that made it difficult,” says Vaeck.