Heidelberg, 27.02.2019
The BioRN Lounges 2019 kicked off yesterday evening in Heidelberg, with a crowded audience for Andreas Pahl, Chief Scientific Officer of Heidelberg Pharma.
As usual it was the occasion for life science companies as well for scientists from our research institutes, to meet and chat about latest news and achievements. The BioRN Lounge is the prime monthly networking event for BioRN members. It is the occasion for exchange, meeting and interaction in a very relaxed atmosphere with some drinks and food. As tradition, an invited speaker from the network presents and discusses with the participants, scientific trends, outbreaking techniques, outstanding research and more.
After a short overview about the company actual pipeline, Andreas Pahl described to the audience the recently obtained results of the ATAC Technology: Antibody-Targeted Amanitin Conjugate. Amanitin is a natural peptide, found in the death cap mushroom, that is still the most common cause of death for mushroom poisoning.
This peptide has shown strong efficacy against tumour cells in vivo and vitro models, can overcome resistance and most importantly can also target quiescent tumour cells.
The potency of this peptide has been leveraged through the antibody drug conjugate technology to improve therapeutic window and reduce toxicity off-target effects.
Heidelberg Pharma has teamed up with Takeda and magenta therapeutics (Boston) to excel in the antibody specificity and with several academic partners in Heidelberg (HI-STEM and Multiple Myelom Unit, Heidelberg) to access tumour models. The resulted optimised compound HDP-101 is now ready to be tested in clinical studies with the specific indication for Multiple Myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells representing 0.8-1% of all cancer worldwide and still considered incurable.
Our next BioRN lounge will be on March 26 as usual in the Kasselhaus by Urban Kitchen and will host Michael Platten, Chairman, Department of Neurology, University Hospital Mannheim; Head CCU Neuroimmunology and Brain Tumor Immunology, DKFZ.
About BioRN
BioRN is a life science research and industry cluster dedicated to the development of cell-specific, molecular and personalised innovative treatments. The BioRN Cluster stands for the development, networking, representation and promotion of the life science region into one of the leading life science clusters in Europe. The cluster-members include renowned academic research institutions such as the Universities of Heidelberg, the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and big pharmaceutical companies such as AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Roche, und Sanofi-Aventis, and about 80 small and medium-sized biotech enterprises. Beyond the members registered in the cluster, BioRN gives access to a wider network via partnerships and collaborations. In terms of the use of clusters for the internationalization of companies, BioRN has founded, together with Leuven (Belgium), Maastricht (Netherlands) and Copenhagen (Denmark), an alliance for the enforcement of biomedical innovation in Europe, called the Health Axis Europe.