As China rises to second place, next only to the U.S., for innovative new drugs, a new report by Clarivate – A Decade of Innovation, A Decade to Come – outlines key policy reforms and regulatory, R&D and investment trends driving past and future growth of Chinese biopharmaceuticals.

Numab Therapeutics AG and Kaken Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. have signed a new collaboration and option agreement to develop ND-081, a multispecific antibody for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease.

Cstone Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. presented preclinical data of CS-2009, a trispecific antibody targeting PD-1, CTLA-4 and VEGF-A, for cancer immunotherapy.

Genome & Co. Ltd. has reported preclinical findings of its anti-CNTN4 antibody, GENA-104A16, and anti-APP antibody, 5A7 — stressing the contactin-4 (CNTN4) and amyloid precursor protein (APP) axis as a potential target for immuno-oncology. In the latest murine experiments, investigators led by Genome executives and researchers of Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) found that blocking the interaction between CNTN4 and APP promoted cancer-destroying responses in mice, suggesting the pathway as a target for immunotherapy.

Oblique Therapeutics AB has achieved a milestone within its research project on the Nav1.8 ion channel with the goal of developing innovative therapeutics for patients with chronic pain.

The anti-HER2 biparatopic antibody (bpAb) KJ-015 was rationally designed at Shanghai Bao Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. by leveraging published antibody-antigen structures to share common light chain with two Fab arms, resulting in functionally balanced high affinity for two HER2 nonoverlapping epitopes.

Claudin-6 (CLDN6) is a tight junction protein that has been found to be up-regulated in around 20 different types of cancer, among them ovarian, endometrial and germ cell tumors. Conventional T-cell engagers (TCEs), although effective, may be improved with costimulation to overcome T-cell exhaustion due to CDE3 stimulation alone.