Radiant: Taking valency and multi-specificity up several notches

By connecting two dozen antibody fragments to a single scaffold, Radiant’s platform creates therapies with dramatically stronger binding than traditional mAbs, enabling the Toronto-based company to go after difficult targets that require clustering for activation or inhibition.

One such protein is 4-1BB, a longstanding cancer immunotherapy target that has yet to take off. The co-stimulatory receptor on T and NK cells has been challenging to drug with antibodies, partly because traditional IgGs weakly cluster receptors, especially in the tumor microenvironment where 4-1BB expression is low...