Boehringer Ingelheim enters strategic collaboration agreement

Boehringer Ingelheim’s biopharmaceutical contract manufacturing business and Molecular Partners have entered into a strategic manufacturing collaboration.

Under the terms of the agreement, Boehringer Ingelheim will be responsible for the generation of E. coli production strains and the manufacture of tox and clinical stage material for multiple DARPin® products supplying Molecular Partners’ proprietary DARPin® pipeline.

Simon Sturge, Corporate Senior Vice President Boehringer Ingelheim Biopharmaceuticals commented: “We are happy to have entered into this collaboration with Molecular Partners as we believe the DARPin® platform will play an important role in the development of next generation antibody like proteins. This agreement reflects the strategy of Boehringer Ingelheim and its new brand Boehringer Ingelheim BioXcellence™ to be dedicated and committed to the development of highly innovative molecule platforms and projects.”

Christian Zahnd, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Molecular Partners said: “Boehringer Ingelheim Biopharmaceuticals is the ideal partner to support us with highest quality GMP production capacity. This collaboration is a further commitment that Molecular Partners establishes a strong proprietary DARPin® pipeline and it will allow us to develop DARPin® based products for patients in need at highest quality and speed.”

“We entered into this collaboration after the successful case study. Both monospecific and multispecific DARPins® could be expressed intracellularely in E. coli as soluble proteins at high titers and were successfully purified to highest standards”, stated Lothar Halmer, Vice President Operations Microbial and Site Head of Boehringer Ingelheim Austria. “We are delighted to be able to work with Molecular Partners to support their clinical development strategies for their DARPins® pipeline.”