Cardinal, Trubion Enter Investigative Bio-Pact

Cardinal Health has entered an agreement with Trubion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. to research a new method to rapidly produce biopharmaceuticals that are smaller than traditional protein-based medicines.

Many traditional biopharmaceuticals are monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) made up of long-chain proteins that can sometimes fail to reach their targets due to their size. Trubion’s proprietary Small Modular Immunopharmacetical (SMIP) drug design technology creates drug candidates of single-chain polypeptides, or short proteins, which are one-third to one-half the size of traditional therapeutic mAbs. As a result, SMIP proteins may help with tissue penetration in certain disease states, while retaining the beneficial therapeutic characteristics of larger molecules.

Cardinal will use its GPEx technology for rapid genetic engineering of stable cell lines that express the Trubion SMIP molecule in sufficient quantities to support Trubion’s clinical trial needs. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

“The biopharmaceutical industry is at a critical time when complex molecules are being developed on an unprecedented scale for a wide array of disease states, many of which are underserved by existing drugs,” said Paul Weiss, Ph.D., president of Cardinal Health’s biopharmaceutical development services center. “While GPEx has been used to engineer cell lines that produce more ‘traditional’ biopharmaceuticals, this agreement calls for us to engineer cell lines that express an engineered novel SMIP molecule. We believe GPEx is very well suited for these type of products, given its inherent flexibility for cell line transduction.”