Harbour BioMed (HBM), and its partners Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center, announced a new research collaboration with Viroclinics-DDL and Kiadis Pharma (Euronext Amsterdam and Brussels: KDS) that will focus on the development of a combination of a monoclonal antibody (mAb) and Natural Killer (NK) cells as a treatment for COVID-19. This new collaboration expands the company's ongoing work in using mAb's against SARS-CoV-2. The terms for this collaboration were not disclosed. The collaboration capitalized on the demonstrated anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity in early studies alongside Kiadis' K-NK cell therapy platform.

COVID-19 has been shown to break down NK cell immunity, and severe COVID-19 patients lack functional NK cells. The fully human, non-blocking antibody 49F1 targets a conserved region of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and has shown strong binding affinity to both SARS-CoV-2 and a second coronavirus SARS-CoV in vitro. The collaboration will study the elimination of SARS-CoV-2 virus and virally infected cells by K-NK cells, and synergies between mAb's and NK cells.

NK cells are the human immune system's first line of defense against tumor cells and infectious disease. K-NK-ID101 cells potentially have enhanced anti-viral activity, while avoiding exacerbating needless inflammation, and therefore may be uniquely suited to repair this lack of functional NK cells. Since K-NK-ID101 cells can be manufactured at large scale and frozen down, they can be immediately and globally made available to patients.