Company Profile
Zymeworks is a global biotechnology company managing a portfolio of licensed healthcare assets and developing a diverse pipeline of novel, multifunctional biotherapeutics to improve the standard of care for difficult-to-treat diseases, including cancer, inflammation, and autoimmune disease. The Company’s asset and royalty aggregation strategy focuses on optimizing positive future cash flows from an emerging portfolio of licensed products such as Ziihera® (zanidatamab-hrii) and other licensed products and product candidates such as pasritamig. In addition, Zymeworks is also building a portfolio of healthcare assets that can generate strong cash flows, while supporting the early-stage development of innovative medicines. Zymeworks engineered and developed Ziihera® (zanidatamab-hrii), a HER2-targeted bispecific antibody using the Company’s proprietary Azymetric™ technology and has entered into separate agreements with BeOne Medicines Ltd. (formerly BeiGene, Ltd.) and Jazz Pharmaceuticals Ireland Limited granting each exclusive rights to develop and commercialize zanidatamab in different territories. Zymeworks is rapidly advancing a robust pipeline of product candidates, leveraging its expertise in both antibody drug conjugates and multispecific antibody therapeutics targeting novel pathways in areas of significant unmet medical need. The Company’s complementary therapeutic platforms and fully integrated drug development engine provide the flexibility and compatibility to precisely engineer and develop highly differentiated antibody-based therapeutics. These capabilities have been further leveraged through strategic partnerships with global biopharmaceutical companies.
Our proprietary capabilities and technologies include several modular, complementary therapeutic platforms that can be used in combination with each other and with existing approaches. This ability to layer technologies without compromising manufacturability enables us to engineer next-generation biotherapeutics with synergistic activity, which we believe will result in improved patient outcomes. Our platforms include:
- Azymetric - our multispecific antibody platform, which enables therapeutic antibodies to simultaneously bind multiple distinct locations on a target (known as an epitope) or to multiple targets. This is achieved by tailoring multiple configurations of the antibody’s Fc and Fab regions (locations on the antibody to which epitopes bind);
- Drug Conjugate Platforms - used to develop antibody-drug conjugate (“ADC”) candidates, are comprised of cytotoxins and the linker technologies used to couple these cytotoxins to tumor-targeting antibodies or proteins. These platforms can be used in conjunction with our other therapeutic platforms, including our multispecific antibody platform, to increase safety and efficacy as compared to existing ADC technologies;
- EFECT - which enables finely tuned modulation (both up and down) of immune cell recruitment and function; and
- ProTECT - which enables tumor-specific activity that may reduce systemic toxicity and simultaneously enhances localized immune co-stimulation or checkpoint modulation that may increase efficacy. Our protein engineering expertise and proprietary structure-guided molecular modeling capabilities enable these therapeutic platforms. Together with our internal antibody discovery and generation technologies, we have established a fully integrated drug development engine and toolkit capable of rapidly delivering a steady pipeline of next-generation product candidates in oncology and other therapeutic areas.