The Antibody Society

the official website of the antibody society

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

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2022 Science Writing Competition winners announced!

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Congratulations to our winners!

To make science accessible, clear, concise communication is essential. The Antibody Society thus offers our student and post-doctoral fellow members a chance to grow this skill through a Science Writing Competition. Entrants submitted essays of 1200 – 1500 words on a topic related to antibody research that were evaluated by our panel of judges.

Our post-doc and student winners are:

Dr. Finn Wolfreys, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA

Essay title: Antibody Discovery’s Diversity Problem

Alexander Brown, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA

Essay title: Immunity in a Deck of Cards

The winning essays can be accessed via the links above.

View all winning essays from the
Science Writing Competitions here

The  next Science Writing Competition opens in Feb. 2023.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

Our Antibody Research Competition is open!

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Attention Students & Post-docs!

 

 

Each year, The Antibody Society sponsors competitions to recognize and encourage the research activities of promising student/postdoctoral fellows.

We invite you to submit a summary of your work on a topic related to antibody research. While such summaries are traditionally presented as posters, feel free to be creative and present the content in other formats, such as video.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Antibody engineering or design
  • Antibody therapeutics
  • Fc effector functions
  • Bispecific antibodies
  • Antibody-drug conjugates
  • Adaptive immune receptor repertoires

The winning antibody research will be featured on The Antibody Society’s website and winners will receive a $400 USD cash prize.

Two winners (1 student, 1 post-doc) will be selected by our panel of judges based on the originality, creativity, scientific merit, and clarity of their research and its presentation.

Send your entry to membership@antibodysociety.org. The first 30 submissions will be considered for the competition. Please include your contact details and whether you are a student or post-doc in your email.

Submission deadline: July 15, 2022

Entry is limited to The Antibody Society student and post-doc members.
Not a member? Register here for your free membership!

Please note that all entrants must abide by the competition rules found here.

 

Join us on May 26 for our next webinar!

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Understanding memory B cell responses induced by heterologous SARS-CoV-2 exposure

Thursday May 26, 2022 11am ET / 5pm CET

Speaker: Laura M. Walker, PhD

Senior Director of Antibody Sciences at Adimab and Chief Scientific Officer and a co-founder of Adagio Therapeutics.

Understanding immune responses following severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) breakthrough infection will facilitate the development of next-generation vaccines. Towards this end, Dr. Walker and her colleagues profiled spike (S)-specific B cell responses following Omicron/BA.1 infection in mRNA-vaccinated donors. The acute antibody response was characterized by high levels of somatic hypermutation and a bias toward recognition of ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strains, suggesting the early activation of vaccine-induced memory B cells. BA.1 breakthrough infection induced a shift in B cell immunodominance hierarchy from the S2 subunit toward the receptor binding domain (RBD). A large proportion of RBD-directed neutralizing antibodies isolated from BA.1 breakthrough infection donors displayed convergent sequence features and broadly recognized SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. Dr. Walker will discuss these findings, which provide insights into the role of pre-existing immunity in shaping the B cell response to heterologous SARS-CoV-2 variant exposure.

Registration is open!

Join us on April 28th for our webinar on Fc silencing techniques!

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Registration is open!

Thursday April 28, 2022, 11am ET

Speaker: Ian Wilkinson, PhD

Antibodies are nature’s pro-drugs, wonderfully evolved to target pathogens and activate immune systems. For certain indications where ADCC or CDC are required this is ideal, but for many other applications activation of inflammatory responses is unnecessary and potentially highly undesirable. In these situations silenced antibodies with either naturally low effector function or engineered Fc domains are the preferred option. However, many of the commonly used options in the clinic, such as IgG4, LALA or aglycosylation, are widely reported to still have residual Fc receptor binding and cytokine activation in patients.

This presentation will describe the first thorough comparison of most of the generic and proprietary Fc silencing mutations, demonstrating that all previously reported variants show residual binding to Fc receptors. It will also describe the discovery of a novel set of mutations, known as STR, that show no detectable binding to Fcγ receptors and do not elicit inflammatory cytokine responses. Meanwhile, immunogenicity, stability and PK are unaffected. This totally silenced variant has the potential to improve the safety and efficacy of therapeutic antibodies and Fc fusion proteins.

FDA approves anti-LAG-3 relatlimab-rmbw as part of a combination therapy for melanoma

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On March 18, 2022, Bristol Myers Squibb announced that Opdualag a fixed-dose combination of anti-PD-1 nivolumab and relatlimab-rmbw, administered as a single intravenous infusion, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of adult and pediatric patients 12 years of age or older with unresectable or metastatic melanoma.

Relatlimab (BMS-986016, ONO4482) is a human IgG4k antibody that targets LAG-3, which, like PD-1, is an immune checkpoint. Bristol Myers Squibb and Ono have a strategic collaboration agreement to jointly develop and commercialize multiple immunotherapies – as single agents and combination regimens – for patients with cancer in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. An marketing authorization application is undergoing evaluation by the European Medicines Agency.

FDA’s approval was based on data from the Phase 2/3 RELATIVITY-047 trial (NCT03470922), which evaluated the effects of relatlimab combined with nivolumab versus nivolumab in a total of 714 patients with previously untreated metastatic or unresectable melanoma. Patients were randomized 1:1 and administered a fixed-dose combination of 160 mg relatlimab and 480 mg nivolumab or 480 mg nivolumab by intravenous infusion every 4 weeks until disease recurrence, unacceptable toxicity or withdrawal of consent. The study’s primary endpoint, progression-free survival (PFS) by blinded independent central review, was met. The median PFS in the group that received both relatlimab and nivolumab (n=355) was significantly longer (10.1 months [95% CI, 6.4–15.7]) than in the group that received nivolumab only (4.6 months [95% CI, 3.4–5.6]; hazard ratio: 0.75 [95% CI, 0.6–0.9]; P = 0.0055). [1]

1. Tawbi HA, Schadendorf D, Lipson EJ, et al. Relatlimab and nivolumab versus nivolumab in untreated advanced melanoma. N Engl J Med. 2022;386:24-34.

Opdualag is the 4th antibody-based therapeutic granted a first approval for marketing in the EU or US in 2022. Explore our searchable table of antibody therapeutics approved in the EU or US for details.