About Us
Overview
Amunix was founded in 2006 by Willem ‘Pim' Stemmer and Volker Schellenberger. We now have 35 employees, including an in house patent attorney and an SVP of business development, and occupy 18,000 sqft of research labs. Our primary focus is the design and early development of protein pharmaceuticals with an extended serum half-life, which require less frequent injection. The increased half-life is obtained by the genetic fusion of a long, hydrophilic, unstructured polyamino acid tail, referred to as ‘XTEN’. When fused to existing approved products, we call these ‘Biosuperiors’.
’XTEN’ products offer improved safety potential over PEGylated products, because XTEN is degraded after uptake by cells, whereas PEG is not and can accumulate to form vacuoles in kidney cells.
XTEN products also offer improved safety potential over Fc fusions because XTEN, like PEG, has been shown to reduce the immunogenicity of the payload, whereas Fc fusions do not.
In addition, many XTEN products offer safety potential because their relatively steady serum concentration avoids the peak dose toxicity and high peak-to-trough concentration ratio that is generally blamed for most of the side effects.
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