Just – Evotec Biologics won a contract from the U.S. Department of Defense worth up to $75 million to develop drug candidates for orthopoxviruses, the group of viruses that cause smallpox and monkeypox.
Just – Evotec Biologics has its origins in Just Biotherapeutics, a Seattle area startup founded in 2014 with the aim of reducing the cost of producing protein therapeutics and making them more accessible worldwide. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed startup was acquired in 2019 by Hamburg, Germany-based Evotec, and is now a subsidiary of the company.
Under the new contract, Just – Evotec will help discover new drug candidates and see them through early, phase 1, clinical trials.
Just – Evotec can design, develop and manufacture antibodies by starting with a drug target such as a viral molecule. Machine learning helps identify potential therapeutic antibodies and proprietary software hones the antibody design to yield high volumes of stable product. The new project will involve both the evaluation of existing antibodies and discovery of new antibodies from scratch, using AI-driven “de novo” antibody design.
Just – Evotec also opened a new manufacturing plant in 2021 and offers clinical trial services.
In a statement Wednesday announcing the contract, Evotec CEO Werner Lanthaler called the company’s platform “the perfect fit for the swift and cost-efficient development and production of quality medical countermeasures.” He added, “We are pleased to provide the DOD with an integrated discovery, development, and manufacturing solution.”
The contract builds on a similar Department of Defense contract awarded in September for the development of therapeutic antibodies against plague.
Vaccines are available for some orthpoxviruses and smallpox was eliminated from the human population by 1980 through a massive vaccination campaign. Better treatments for such viruses are needed and there are no antibody-based drugs targeting them.
