Ligand Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, a biopharmaceutical company, announced it has entered into a worldwide license agreement with Emergent BioSolutions Inc., a global specialty biopharmaceutical company that focuses on emerging health threats, as well as oncology, transplantation, infectious diseases and autoimmune disorders.

Under the license, Emergent will use the OmniRat, OmniMouse and OmniFlic technologies to discover fully human mono- and bispecific antibodies. Ligand will be eligible to receive annual access payments, fees on patent filings, potential milestone payments and royalties on future net sales of any antibodies discovered under the license.

OmniAb includes three transgenic animal platforms for producing mono- and bispecific human therapeutic antibodies. OmniRat is the industry’s first human monoclonal antibody technology based on rats. It has a complete immune system with a diverse antibody repertoire and generates antibodies with human idiotypes as effectively as wild-type animals make rat antibodies. OmniMouse is a transgenic mouse that complements OmniRat and expands epitope coverage. OmniFlic is an engineered rat with a fixed light chain for development of bispecific, fully human antibodies. The three platforms use patented technology, have broad freedom to operate and deliver fully human antibodies with high affinity, specificity, expression, solubility and stability.

“Emergent BioSolutions is a new partner for Ligand and our first for OmniAb since we gained the technology platform through our recent acquisition of OMT,” said John Higgins, chief executive officer of Ligand Pharmaceuticals.

“This agreement demonstrates Ligand’s success in acquiring novel and important platform technologies and creating new business relationships and economics from them. We will continue to seek high-quality partners working in antibody discovery whose efforts will advance our partnered portfolio and shots-on-goal business model.”