The Antibody Society

the official website of the antibody society

An international non-profit supporting antibody-related research and development.

Call for Papers on Biopharmaceutical Informatics

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As evident from papers published in mAbs in recent years, computation is being increasingly used in the discovery and development of antibody-based biologic drugs. To celebrate the rise of biopharmaceutical informatics directed towards antibody R & D, we invite The Antibody Society members, mAbs readers and the broader scientific community to contribute review articles focused on highlighting how computation has enabled their investigations or led them to new ones. The reviews should narrate the state of the art and speculate on new vistas for computational applications in the field.

We are particularly interested in reviews in the following topics:

  • Analyses of immune repertoires and their role in target validation and drug discovery.
  • Analyses of antibody structure-function relationships with emphasis on therapeutic antibody-based biologics.
  • Structure-based design of antibody fragments (e.g., nanobodies) and antibody-based multi-specific molecular formats.
  • Design of antibody libraries for different display strategies and/or with improved developability.
  • Structure-based affinity maturation and optimization of biologic lead candidates.
  • Molecular simulations of antibodies to understand their solution behaviors, such as aggregation, viscosity and physicochemical degradation.
  • Consideration of developability in biologic drug discovery and design.
  • Developability assessments at early-stage development.
  • Specific and non-specific interactions formed by antibodies in vitro and in vivo.
  • Computation in antibody formulations – design of novel excipients.
  • Applications of artificial Intelligence and machine learning towards antibody discovery, development and manufacturing.
  • Progress and challenges in modeling antibodies and multi-specific formats.
  • Predicting chemical degradation in antibody-based biologic drugs.
  • Optimizing antigens for greater immunization success.

Although these topics are especially of interest, we welcome well-written reviews in related areas as well.

Publication charges will be waived for six of the best review articles selected from pre-submission inquiries, which should consist of the title, abstract and general outline of the intended review article.

The deadline for the pre-submission enquiries is February 15, 2021, and the deadline for submission of the completed review articles is June 30, 2021.

Please send pre-submission inquiries to Assistant Editor Dr. Sandeep Kumar (skumarmabs@gmail.com) and Editor-in-Chief Dr. Janice Reichert (reichert.biotechconsulting@gmail.com), and contact us if you have any questions.

Antibodies to Watch in 2021 is now online!

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Click here to download this newly published mAbs article!

In this 12th annual installment of the Antibodies to Watch article series, we discuss key events in antibody therapeutics development that occurred in 2020 and forecast events that might occur in 2021. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic posed an array of challenges and opportunities to the healthcare system in 2020, and it will continue to do so in 2021. Remarkably, by late November 2020, two anti-SARS-CoV antibody products, bamlanivimab and the casirivimab and imdevimab cocktail, were authorized for emergency use by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the repurposed antibodies levilimab and itolizumab had been registered for emergency use as treatments for COVID-19 in Russia and India, respectively.

Despite the pandemic, 10 antibody therapeutics had been granted first approval in the US or EU in 2020, as of November, and 2 more (tanezumab and margetuximab) may be granted approvals in December 2020.* In addition, prolgolimab and olokizumab had been granted first approvals in Russia and cetuximab saratolacan sodium was first approved in Japan.

The number of approvals in 2021 may set a record, as marketing applications for 16 investigational antibody therapeutics are already undergoing regulatory review by either the FDA or the European Medicines Agency. Of these 16 mAbs, 11 are possible treatments for non-cancer indications and 5 are potential treatments for cancer.

Based on the information publicly available as of November 2020, 44 antibody therapeutics are in late-stage clinical studies for non-cancer indications, including 6 for COVID-19, and marketing applications for at least 6 (leronlimab, tezepelumab, faricimab, ligelizumab, garetosmab, and fasinumab) are planned in 2021. In addition, 44 antibody therapeutics are in late-stage clinical studies for cancer indications. Of these 44, marketing application submissions for 13 may be submitted by the end of 2021.

*Note added in proof on key events announced during December 1-21, 2020: margetuximab-cmkb and ansuvimab-zykl were approved by FDA on December 16 and 21, 2020, respectively; biologics license applications were submitted for ublituximab and amivantamab.

Keep up to date on US and EU approvals all year by visiting our website!

The Antibody Society maintains a comprehensive table of approved monoclonal antibody therapeutics and those in regulatory review in the EU or US. The table, which is located in the Web Resources section of the Society’s website, can be downloaded in Excel format.

Successful AIRR Community Meeting V

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The fifth AIRR Community meeting (#AIRRC5) was held virtually Dec 8–10, 2020. The theme of this meeting was “Zooming in to the AIRR Community” connecting the global AIRR research community despite the pandemic for a series of Working Group & Sub-committee presentations, scientific sessions, interactive poster sessions, software tool demonstrations and networking events.

AIRR Community meetings are the premier event for research on adaptive immune-receptor repertoires. They are also the primary location where the AIRR-Community’s Working Groups and Sub-committees come together in one location to discuss how to push standardization in AIRR-sequencing (AIRR-seq) data and analysis forward.  All video recordings can be found here https://www.youtube.com/airrcommunity. All presentations can be found in the AIRR Community Resources section of the website. 

Just as the biology of AIRR is high-dimensional, this meeting’s success was as well!  We gathered some of the numbers that best describe the success of the #AIRRC5 meeting.

  • 1 Keynote speaker: Ignacio Sanz (Emory University School of Medicine, USA)
  • 3 Basic Science Presentations, 3 Biomedical Science Presentations
  • Attendees from 18 countries and 6 continents
  • 161 Registrants 
  • 5 Sponsors 
  • 6 Invited Speakers 
  • 2 Judging Panels 
  • 4 Short Talk Presenters 
  • 28 Poster Presenters 
  • 4 Software Demonstrators 
  • 9 Moderators 
  • 19 Community Presenters 
  • This was the second time a twitter hashtag was used for an AIRR Community Meeting (#AIRRV)
  • We achieved the milestone of more than 100 subscribers for the AIRRC YouTube channel thus enabling a custom YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/airrcommunity 
  • In addition to the main meeting, two free pre-meetings were held with over 175 participants
    • Pre-meeting 1: “AIRR-seq in the Pandemic” co-hosted by the AIRR Community and Tsinghua University in China which took place on December 5th/6th
    • Pre-meeting 2 “AIRR-seq Biological Standards and Workflows“ which was hosted by the Biological Resources Working Group on December 7th.

Antibody Discovery in the Cloud: Using NGS to expand the universe of selectable antibodies

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Registration for this free event is now open!

January 21 2021, 9am PST/12 ET/6pm CET

Speakers: Drs. Andrew Bradbury and M. Frank Erasmus (Specifica)

Antibody Discovery in the Cloud: Using NGS to expand the universe of selectable antibodies

The Specifica Generation 3 platform is able to generate 500-5000 different antibody clonotypes against targets of interest, with over 80% of selected antibodies having no measurable biophysical liabilities and 20% having subnanomolar affinities. The most common approach to selecting antibodies from display technologies involves low-throughput random colony screening. However, this missed many potential therapeutic leads, particularly when diversity is high. Specifica uses next generation sequencing (NGS) to build its libraries as well as characterize selection outputs. In order to fully exploit the universe of selectable antibodies, Specifica has developed a cloud-based software platform, designed exclusively for antibody engineers and bioinformaticians, to enable a streamlined identification of leads with broad epitope coverage. Application of this to selection outputs has increased the number of clonotype leads by five to ten fold over random colony screening, significantly expanding the explorable paratope space.

Click here to register!

AIRR Community and PrecisionFDA COVID-19 Precision Immunology App-a-thon

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The AIRR Community is helping to lead the PrecisionFDA COVID-19 Precision Immunology App-a-thon.  

This is part of the “precisionFDA Challenges” program, which is designed to engage and improve software that analyzes NGS (next generation sequencing data) through community challenges. There were 68 bioinformaticians pre-registered for the Precision Immunology Challenge, and more are expected to join as the app-a-thon continues.  These “citizen scientists” will form teams to design software that will make AIRR-seq data more available and accessible for immunologists to realize the promise of immunological big data for improved diagnostics and therapeutics in immunotherapy.

The Precision Immunology Challenge uses AIRR-seq repertoire data from COVID-19 patients downloaded from the AIRR Data Commons (VDJServer and iReceptor Public Archive) through the iReceptor Gateway. These data sets have been carefully chosen to include data on patient demography and clinical outcome in order to illuminate the relationship between personalized adaptive immunity molecular data and COVID-19 disease variables.

The AIRR Community Diagnostics Working Group published a blog post as part of this effort, explaining the possible uses of AIRR-seq data in the clinic in the near future.

The app-a-thon runs through February 2021 at which time the apps will be judged for usability, impact and innovation.