Evotec has signed a strategic collaboration agreement to offer antibody discovery and development service to 4-Antibody.

Evotec's high content screening combined with 4-Antibody's antibody selection approach will offer new possibilities for reduced late stage attrition and better efficacy.

The high content screening approach will allow screening of large and diverse antibody populations for desired functionality and activity.

Evotec CEO Werner Lanthaler said, "This 'EVOmAb' turn-key solution will deliver to our customers a much higher chance to bring an antibody to the market than traditional affinity-selected antibody approaches."

The new collaboration combines 4-Antibody's high throughput in vitro Retrocyte Display technology into Evotec's high throughput cell-based assay platform.

The Retrocyte Display technology is a cellular antibody expression platform which allows expression and screening of full-length immunoglobulin antibody libraries in mammalian B-lineage cells for the identification of antigen-specific fully human monoclonal antibodies.

The companies have agreed to share financial rewards of the approach. 4-Antibody will gain EUR2m access fee initially from Evotec, which will be fully reimbursed from future returns.