Pfizer, Visterra collaborate to discover novel antibodies

Visterra Inc., developer of novel therapeutics to treat major diseases, announced today that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Pfizer to discover novel antibodies using Visterra's proprietary platform.    

Under the terms of the agreement, Visterra will receive an up-front fee as well as research funding, and is eligible to receive predetermined payments for meeting certain research and development milestones, plus royalties upon any product commercialization.

"We are very pleased that our first pharmaceutical partnership is with Pfizer, an industry leader with broad drug development expertise," said Steven Brugger, CEO of Visterra. "This collaboration further supports the potential utility of Visterra's antibody design platform, and we look forward to collaborating with Pfizer while we continue to advance Visterra's own internal product pipeline."

"We view Visterra's technology as a promising approach for engineering therapeutic antibodies, and look forward to this collaboration" said Jose-Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos, Senior Vice President, Research and Development, Biotherapeutics with Pfizer.