Tharimmune, Inc. announced an option agreement for an exclusive license with Washington University in St. Louis for the rights to develop and commercialize technology related to multiple hybridomas and antibodies directed specifically towards human HER2. The technology was developed through a collaboration of multidisciplinary researchers in cancer immunology at Washington University School of Medicine.

Tharimmune is advancing multi-specific technology targeting the extracellular domains of HER2 and HER3. These validated targets have been extensively studied and belong to the ERBB receptor tyrosine kinase family and are exploited by cancer cells to promote tumorigenesis and metastasis. HER2, an extensively studied target, has multiple approved therapeutics for solid tumors and evidence suggests that HER3 plays a central role through interacting with neighboring receptors.

The Company is developing antibodies overlapping with different epitopes on HER2 in contrast to approved therapies with a potential for complementary fit to HER3, affecting novel conformational epitopes thought to be important in intracellular downstream signaling in tumor cells. The compounds developed by the team at Washington University could complement novel combinations to target known and unknown unique epitopes of the extracellular domains of human HER2 combined with internal efforts to create novel multispecific tunable antibodies and antibody drug conjugates (ADCs). The Company also intends to incorporate the work completed at Washington University to continue advancing internal novel antibodies derived in bovine animals or cows and resulting from ultra-long complementary determining region 3 (CDR3) domains.

These potentially enable access to epitopes that had previously been hidden or highly inaccessible in traditional antibody development. With a much smaller size compared to traditional antibodies, combined with structural diversity, Knobs can bind to conformational, linear or discontinuous epitopes in "undruggable" areas of validated targets. This conceivable "multi-specific" capacity of Knobs, are the basis of developing Tharimmune's early-stage pipeline including ADCs and may more efficiently target multiple cell surface portions compared to known or existing biologics.