The Antibody Society

the official website of the antibody society

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

Student/Post-doc Poster Competition Winners Announced!

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Congratulations to our winners!

To recognize the research activities of promising student and postdoctoral attendees of Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics, The Antibody Society sponsors a competition for our student/postdoc members who submit posters for display at the meeting. Our judges select the best work based on originality, relevance and perceived impact on the field of antibody R&D.

This year, our judges selected one student and one postdoc winners who receive: 1) a complimentary registration to attend the conference and pre-conference sessions; 2) an opportunity to give a short oral presentation of their work in one of the conference sessions; and 3) support for travel expenses.

The winners of the contest are:

Timothy Czajka, University of New York at Albany (graduate student winner)
Poster title: RIP-Off: An Intrabody-based Strategy to Neutralize Ricin and other Ribosome-Inactivating Protein (RIP) Toxins

Kamal Joshi, Genentech (Postdoctoral research fellow winner)
Poster title: Toward Deeper Understanding of Bispecific Antibodies

Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics, the annual meeting of The Antibody Society, managed by KNect365, will be held December 10-13, 2019 in San Diego, CA.

Society members receive a 15% discount on the registration fee. Contact us at membership@antibodysociety.org for the code.

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Successful AIRR Community Meeting IV

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The fourth AIRR Community meeting (#AIRRC4) took place at the University of Genoa, May 11–15, 2019, in an unusual and gorgeous location. All talks were held in a 17th century church that has been repurposed for conference settings. The overarching theme of this meeting was “Bridging the Gaps” which aimed to address technological gaps between the amounts of accumulated data and our ability to process them, and the need for more involvement of stakeholder communities (industry, clinicians, patient communities) for the dissemination and implementation of the standards developed by the AIRR Community. 

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 meeting documents, slides, and video recordings can be found here:
https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/meetings/communityiv/

Just like the biology of immune repertoires is high-dimensional, this meeting’s success was as well!  We gathered some of the numbers that best describe the success of the AIRR C IV meeting.

  • 2 Keynote speakers: Sai T. Reddy (ETH, Zürich, CH), Antonio Lanzavecchia (Instituto di Ricerca in Biomedicina, Bellinzona, CH)
  • 154 attendees from 5 continents and 22 countries
  • 18 invited speakers
  • 15 sponsors
  • This was the first time a twitter hashtag was used for an AIRR Community Meeting
  • Two pre-meeting workshops were held, teaching the basics of immunology, and of AIRR-seq data analysis 
  • AIRR-seq Tool demonstrations and Pipeline and Data Repository tutorial sessions were held

 

 

World ADC Award Winners Announced

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The Antibody Society congratulates the winners of World ADC Awards!

World ADC Awards showcases the innovation, leadership and devotion shown by the best companies, teams and individuals in the industry. Across 9 categories, the Awards recognized the extraordinary endeavours, teamwork and commercial acumen that has propelled the antibody-drug conjugate field to the forefront of cancer research today. The 6th Annual World ADC Awards Ceremony took place on the evening of Thursday October 10, 2019 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, San Diego. The finalists and winners were shortlisted from over 1,147 votes cast, and scientific proposals from each submission were evaluated by the Judging panel.

The 2019 winners are:

Best ADC Platform Technology

Zymeworks (ZymeLink) – Winner
LegoChem Bio (Scaffold Based Approach) – Runner Up

Best New Drug Developer

ADC Therapeutics – Winner
Zymeworks – Runner Up

Most Promising Clinical Candidate

Trastuzumab Deruxtecan (DS-8201a) – Winner
Enfortumab Vedotin (Seattle Genetics/Astella) – Runner Up

Best Contract Manufacturing Provider

BSP Pharmaceuticals – Winner
Millipore Sigma – Runner Up

Best Contract Research Provider

PPD – Winner
Abzena – Runner Up

Best Pre-Clinical Publication

Winner: Chemically triggered drug release from an antibody-drug conjugate leads to potent antitumour activity in mice. Rossin R, Versteegen RM, Wu J, Khasanov A, Wessels HJ, Steenbergen EJ, Ten Hoeve W, Janssen HM, van Onzen AHAM, Hudson PJ, Robillard MS. Nat Commun. 2018 May 4;9(1):1484.

Runner Up: Chemically Defined Antibody- and Small Molecule-Drug Conjugates for in Vivo Tumor Targeting Applications: A Comparative Analysis. Cazzamalli S, Dal Corso A, Widmayer F, Neri D. J Am Chem Soc. 2018 Feb 7;140(5):1617-1621.

Best Clinical Publication

Winner: Brentuximab Vedotin with Chemotherapy for Stage III or IV Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Connors JM, Jurczak W, Straus DJ, Ansell SM, Kim WS, Gallamini A, Younes A, Alekseev S, Illés Á, Picardi M, Lech-Maranda E, Oki Y, Feldman T, Smolewski P, Savage KJ, Bartlett NL, Walewski J, Chen R, Ramchandren R, Zinzani PL, Cunningham D, Rosta A, Josephson NC, Song E, Sachs J, Liu R, Jolin HA, Huebner D, Radford J; ECHELON-1 Study Group. N Engl J Med. 2018 Jan 25;378(4):331-344. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1708984.

Individual Input to the Field 2018

Prof. Dario Neri  (ETH Zurich)

Long-Standing Contribution to the Field

Dr. Alain Beck (Pierre Fabre)

For more information about the World ADC Awards, visit http://worldadc-awards.com/

For more information about the World ADC San Diego conference, visit https://worldadc-usa.com/

FDA approves brolucizumab-dbll (BEOVU®)

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On October 7, 2019, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved brolucizumab-dbll (BEOVU®) for the treatment of neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD). Brolucizumab is a humanized antibody single-chain variable fragment that binds to the 3 major isoforms of human vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), thereby interfering with their interaction with receptors VEGFR-1 and VEGFR-2 and suppressing endothelial cell proliferation, neovascularization and vascular permeability. BEOVU is administered by intravitreal injection, and the recommended dose is 6 mg monthly for the first three doses, followed by one dose of 6 mg every 8-12 weeks. A marketing application for brolucizumab is undergoing review by EMA.

FDA’s approval was based on data from two Phase 3 studies, HAWK (NCT02307682) and HARRIER (NCT02434328), comparing the efficacy and safety of intravitreal injections of brolucizumab versus aflibercept in nAMD. Brolucizumab met the primary efficacy endpoint of non-inferiority to aflibercept (EYLEA®) in mean change in best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) at week 48 in both trials, with a mean change in BCVA of 6.6 letters for brolucizumab 6 mg versus 6.8 letters for aflibercept in HAWK trial and 6.9 letters versus 7.6 letters, respectively, in the HARRIER study. Additionally, at week 48, brolucizumab was superior to aflibercept in secondary endpoints considered key parameters of the disease, such as central subfield retinal thickness and retinal fluid (intraretinal fluid and/or subretinal fluid). Results at 96 weeks reaffirmed the superiority of brolucizumab 6 mg in reduction of retinal fluid, and patients who received this dose continued to demonstrate reductions in central subfield thickness.

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The Antibody Society maintains a comprehensive table of approved monoclonal antibody therapeutics and those in regulatory review in the EU or US. Located in the ‘Web Resources’ section of our website, the list is updated regularly and can be downloaded in Excel format.

New publication on OGRDB, the Open Germline Receptor Database, is available!

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Congratulations to The Antibody Society’s Adaptive Immune Repertoire Community on the publication of their newest paper, OGRDB: a reference database of inferred immune receptor genes, in Nucleic Acid Research. The paper is open access and can be freely downloaded here.

High-throughput sequencing of the adaptive immune receptor repertoire (AIRR-seq) is providing unprecedented insights into the immune response to disease and into the development of immune disorders. The accurate interpretation of AIRR-seq data depends on the existence of comprehensive germline gene reference sets. Current sets are known to be incomplete and unrepresentative of the degree of polymorphism and diversity in human and animal populations. A key issue is the complexity of the genomic regions in which they lie, which, because of the presence of multiple repeats, insertions and deletions, have not proved tractable with short-read whole genome sequencing. Recently, tools and methods for inferring such gene sequences from AIRR-seq datasets have become available, and a community approach has been developed for the expert review and publication of such inferences. Here, we present OGRDB, the Open Germline Receptor Database (https://ogrdb.airr-community.org), a public resource for the submission, review and publication of previously unknown receptor germline sequences together with supporting evidence.