A Drug Discovery Alliance For The Ages
By Matthew Pillar, Editor, Bioprocess Online
As many good and longstanding friendships do, it all started with beer.
If you trace the roots of the partnership between Kyowa Kirin North America and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology deep enough, you’ll find the remnant hulls of seeds planted by research scientists and fertilized by beer.
It was the mid-1980s, when research scientists were exploring the fundamentals of manipulating living cells from which antibodies could be produced to target specific regions of specific pathogens to positive clinical effect.
With Kirin’s continuous support, which has come through a series of Collaborative Research Agreements executed every three years since 1992, the La Jolla Institute has grown into a renowned center for immunological research. Early this year, the La Jolla Institute and Kyowa Kirin announced another three-year extension of the agreement through 2024.
Supporting The La Jolla Institute’s Mission
At any given time, more than 200 postdocs and trainees call the La Jolla Institute their research home.
The Agreement
The attributes that make the La Jolla Institute unique are important to the relationship with Kyowa Kirin because the Collaborative Research Agreement enables the sharing of those resources.
“We share resources and ideas. We work together on projects. And we've grown up together through the birth of the biotech industry,” says Dr. Martin. “We maintain our independence, but our collaboration is mutually beneficial.”
The La Jolla Institute is funded largely by grants from the NIH and other granting agencies that give it the liberty to conduct a broad spectrum of academic immunological research. The funding associated with the Collaborative Research Agreement with Kyowa Kirin, on the other hand, is focused on projects that are particularly interesting to the commercial interests of Kyowa Kirin. Both organizations value the opportunities afforded by the agreement to translate basic research into potential clinical and commercial applications.
The Value Of Shared Physical Space
Andrew McKnight, D. Phil. is Chief Research Officer and Head of Open Innovation, based in Kyowa Kirin’s La Jolla research facility – one of the company’s five global laboratories focused on early-stage research and drug discovery. He’s quick to point out another shining feature of the collaboration – his office sits just a hundred-yard-dash from Dr. Martin’s. “We share the same research facility, the majority of which is occupied by employees of the La Jolla Institute,” he explains.
The building, which the collaborators have shared since its construction in 2006, comprises more than 140,000 square feet of leased research space on the campus of UC San Diego. The physical alliance was a strategic decision.
“We manage the facility because we’re the bigger part of it,” says Dr. Martin. “We handle administrative duties while our scientific core does their sequencing, cellular characterization by flow cytometry and microscopy, and cryo-electron microscopy work. These resources and instruments are all available to our partners at Kyowa Kirin,” he says. “It’s extremely beneficial to have all of these resources, which you might find scattered about in a major university, packaged into a single facility and at our full disposal.”
Dr. McKnight says the efficiencies enabled by on-site collaboration are immeasurable. “The ability for my team to walk downstairs to a faculty member’s office to discuss what they’re working on, or for them to walk upstairs to explore new ideas for collaboration, that’s priceless,” he says. “We work on innovative drug discovery projects in a very collegial way.”
An Alliance That’s Produced
Asked why the collaboration has stood the test of time—it’s perhaps the longest-running of its kind in biopharma—Dr. Martin doesn’t hesitate. “I think it's lasted so long because it has been productive.”
Dr. McKnight agrees and points to some specific examples, such as an anti-LIGHT mAb researched by La Jolla Institute faculty alumnus Dr. Carl Ware. That antibody was licensed by Kyowa Kirin to Cerecor (now Avalo Therapeutics) and is now in mid-to-late-stage clinical trials for COVID-19 (fast track designation), inflammatory bowel disease, and non-eosinophilic asthma.
“Much of the early (pre-discovery) research studies that led to our investigational candidate antibody KHK4083 for atopic dermatitis were performed by Dr. Mick Croft within the La Jolla Institute,” says Dr. McKnight. “That antibody very effectively targets the OX40 molecule on activated T cells, and we recently announced a new partnership with Amgen to further develop and, hopefully, commercialize it,” he says. The company wrapped phase 2 studies of that fully-human mAb last year.
“You have to plant a lot of seeds to get a tree in this business, and the collaborative agreement with Kyowa Kirin has facilitated that,” says Dr. Martin. “There are a lot of seedlings that we’re nurturing, from the basic discovery of new antibodies to preclinical programs that are currently ongoing and remain proprietary and undisclosed,” he says.
Kyowa Kirin and the La Jolla Institute also co-host an annual symposium—or did, before it took a COVID-19 hiatus—that brings world-renowned experts on specific immunologic indications together in San Diego to share and discuss their work. The capstone of the symposium harkens back to Kyowa Kirin’s roots, with a reception at a local San Diego microbrewery. It’s hoping to bring that event back this fall.
Connecting The Academic, Industry Dots
Dr. Martin says collaborations like this move industry and academia forward in lockstep. “If you went back 30 years in time, you’d see that faculty didn't know anything about pharmaceutical development, and pharmaceutical companies didn't know anything about biotechnology,” he says. “Today, a lot of scientists in academia are very sophisticated about drug discovery. And obviously, Kyowa Kirin is an example of a company that’s extremely sophisticated at biotechnology.”
That being said, Kyowa Kirin’s support isn’t entirely associated with translations that are earmarked for clinical development. The company is proud to support the La Jolla Institute’s contributions to broader scientific understanding of disease and biology, and also takes great pride in supporting the next generation of researchers. One entirely new aspect of the collaboration, dubbed the Accelerator Program, allocates one year of “Primer Award” funding to junior-level postdocs and graduate students who propose basic research concepts that are jointly selected by Kyowa Kirin and La Jolla Institute faculty. After year one, those projects are eligible to compete for “Booster Award” funding for up to two more years. “The intent is to help set up these young researchers perform experiments they might not otherwise be able to fund, and to give them experience managing those funds,” says Dr. McKnight.
Learn more about Kyowa Kirin
Learn more about the La Jolla Institute for Immunology