Affibody Announces Participation in the CellNova Center

Solna, Sweden, February 26, 2018. Affibody AB (“Affibody”), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing a portfolio of innovative drug projects, today announced its participation in the CellNova Center.

The CellNova center is a center for development and production of next generation biological drugs. The center received SEK 40 million in funding from Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova in June 2017 and the kick-off meeting for all participants took place on February 22, 2018. One of the key initiators of the center is Affibody’s founder and longtime board member Prof. Mathias Uhlén.

“Having access to world leading research right on your doorstep is a unique position for any biotech company to be in”, said David Bejker, CEO of Affibody. “We believe our participation in the CellNova center will accelerate our ability to successfully identify new projects and advance treatments for patients. The participation should be seen against the backdrop of our ambition to systematically explore our highly innovative drug discovery and development platform to create a broad and differentiated product pipeline based on the Affibody® drug class.”

CellNova is the continuation of the Human Protein Atlas and the more recent Tissue Atlas and Cell Atlas. The Human Protein Atlas has generated the largest set of antibodies to human proteins in the world and all these 45,000 antibodies, corresponding to protein fragments from 19,500 human protein-coding genes, will be available for participants in the center. As part of these efforts, the researchers have analyzed the “Druggable Proteome” and the proteins predicted to be secreted or membrane-bound, also called the “Secretome” and the “Membrane Proteome”. The “Human Secretome” project has therefore been initiated with the objective to generate and enable further characterization of the vast majority of the 3,000 proteins predicted by the Human Protein Atlas program to be secreted in humans by 2020.

“Affibody’s involvement in CellNova will allow us to benefit from this internationally unique resource of human proteins of biomedical and pharmaceutical interest to facilitate our drug discovery and development”, said Fredrik Frejd, CSO of Affibody. “At Affibody, we have built what we believe to be an innovative and extraordinarily efficient experimental medicine approach to drug development. We’re now excited to take part in and contribute to many of the center’s programs and look forward to further accelerating our science driven experimental medicine approach on the back of this collaboration”.