Candidate: TY027
Category: ANTIBODY
Type: Monoclonal antibody (mAb) targeting SARS-CoV-2
Status: Tychan said June 10 it is launching Phase I clinical trials to assess TY027 in patients with COVID-19, following approval by Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority. The Phase I trial, to be conducted by SingHealth Investigational Medicine Unit, is expected to take six weeks, during which it aims to establish the efficacy of the mAb. Efficacy data is expected to be available in the third quarter, Tychan said.
TY027 showed full clearance of the virus in lab studies, demonstrated safety in preclinical studies, and achieved a successful three-week drug stability test, Tychan said.
Tychan developed TY027, including discovery and lab and preclinical studies, in four months using its rapid-response platform, through which the company developed a mAb against Yellow Fever in seven months from design to first-in-human infusion, and a mAb against Zika in nine months., developed by the company’s founders, Profs. Ram Sasisekharan, PhD, of MIT/Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) and Ooi Eng Eong, PhD, of Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School, and their team.
“As for antibody engineering, we use computational methods to target functionally important, and evolutionarily stable, regions on the virus, and our bioprocessing method makes antibodies in a matter of weeks, instead of the many months usually required if working with a master cell bank,” Sasisekharan told GEN in May. We showed there is no difference between the antibodies from the traditional approach and our technique.”
Singapore-based Tychan developed TY027 in partnership with several of the country’s government agencies, including Singapore’s Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Health, and the Economic Development Board.
COVID-19: 200 Candidates and Counting
To navigate through the >200 potential therapeutic and vaccine options for COVID-19, GEN has grouped the candidates into four broad categories based on their developmental and (where applicable) clinical progress:
● FRONT RUNNER – the most promising therapeutics/vaccines based on clinical progress, favorable data or both.
● DEFINITELY MAYBE – earlier phases with promising partners, or more advanced candidates in development that have generated uneven data.
● KEEPING AN EYE ON… – interesting technology, attracting notable partners, or both, but preliminary data.
● TOO SOON TO TELL – longshots pending additional experimental and/or clinical data.
GEN has also tagged the most common treatment types:
● ANTIVIRAL
● VAX
● ANTIBODY
● RNA
