antibody discovery Archives - The Antibody Society

The Society has selected mAbs as its Official Journal!

July 29, 2022 by The Antibody Society

The Antibody Society is pleased to announce that it has partnered with Taylor & Francis, a leading research publisher, to make mAbs the Society’s Official Journal. mAbs is a multidisciplinary, open access journal dedicated to the art and science of antibody research and development. The journal has a strong scientific and medical focus but serves a broad readership, including specialists in technology transfer, legal issues, investment, and the regulation of therapeutics.

Since 2009, mAbs has published high quality reports, reviews, and perspective articles covering a range of antibody R&D topics, including:

Engineering and selection of antibody therapeutics, including antibody-drug conjugates, multispecific antibodies, and single-domain antibodies
Machine learning and artificial intelligence applications
Non-clinical studies of antibodies, such as mechanism of action studies, safety, and efficacy studies in animals
Manufacturing and formulation
Regulatory review of antibody therapeutics
Post-approval topics, such as markets

The journal’s 2021 Impact Factor is 6.440 and, in total, articles are downloaded at a rate of over 1 million per year. Articles in the current volume (14) can be found here.

Members of The Antibody Society receive a 10% discount on article publication charges using their member code.

We look forward to a productive partnership with Taylor & Francis.

Register for our upcoming webinar on BLI and its use in anti-snake venom antibody discovery

July 19, 2022 by Janice Reichert

Biolayer interferometry (BLI) is gaining popularity for protein and small molecule quantitation and kinetics research. The new advancements in biosensors, ease of use, reproducibility and low cost is driving its adoption. Even though BLI is one of the easiest of the tools, as with many other techniques, getting the best data depends on optimization of some key experimental factors. This webinar will discuss the best practices in BLI and result of such implementation by way of an example of screening of a broadly neutralizing antibody of snake venoms.

Snake envenomation results in over 100,000 deaths and 300,000 permanent disabilities in humans annually. Contemporary antivenoms are produced from the polyclonal serum of venom-immunized livestock and are specific to a single or narrow genetic range of related snakes. Could a broadly neutralizing monoclonal antibody, or a cocktail of a few broad components, provide protection from diverse snake venoms? Centi-3FTX-D09, originating from the B-cell memory of a human subject with an extensive history of diverse snake venom exposure, recognized a conserved neutralizing epitope of 3-finger toxins (3FTXs), a dominant snake neurotoxin. Four crystal structures of Centi-3FTX-D09 in complex with 3FTXs from mamba, taipan, krait, and cobra revealed the mechanism of broad neutralization to be epitope mimicry of the interface between these neurotoxins and their native host target, the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. Centi-3FTX-D09 provided in-vivo protection against diverse 3FTXs and, in combination with the phospholipase inhibitor varespladib, protection against whole venom challenge for diverse, genetically distinct, elapid species.

About the Speakers

Register here!

2022 Science Writing Competition winners announced!

May 15, 2022 by Janice Reichert

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!

Biologics Developability: Call for Papers

May 2, 2022 by The Antibody Society

Developability of biologics refers to their likelihood of success in progressing through manufacturing and clinical trials toward approval by regulatory authorities to be marketed as a drug for use in humans. A highly developable biologic should not only maintain high titer, good chemical and structural stability, resistance to various manufacturing stresses, such as low pH, shear stress, light, heat, for ease of manufacturing, but also possess target specificity, durable pharmacokinetics (PK) and low immunogenicity for assurance of safety and efficacy. Thus, developability is an umbrella concept under which manufacturability and other drug-like properties reside. Developability assessment via experimental assays or in silico analyses conducted during early-phase research can be crucial in (1) shaping lead molecule optimization strategy, (2) supporting selection of a final drug candidate molecule for progression into manufacturing, GLP toxicity studies, and other preparations for human clinical trials, and (3) reducing attrition and failure of therapeutic molecules in clinical trials. During the development stage, developability evaluation focuses more on assessment of critical quality attributes (CQAs) and quality control of product and manufacturing process-related impurities to ensure safety and efficacy.

Since the concept was introduced over a decade ago, developability is now a fast-changing field. mAbs thus aims to assemble a collection of articles reflecting the latest thinking across the industry in this area of drug research and development. As such, we invite The Antibody Society members, mAbs readers and the broader scientific community to contribute review articles focused on early stage developability assessment, and practical considerations, new technologies and strategies for CQAs assessment and control system at later stages of drug development. The reviews should narrate the state of the art and speculate on new vistas for the field.

mAbs will waive publication charges for up to 8 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.

We are particularly interested in reviews in the following topics:

Early-Stage Drug Research

● Review of the latest assays being used for assessment of developability. Include practical considerations of workflows, prioritization of assays given limited amounts of protein early on and based on known redundancies, and interpretations of assay results for decision making

● Review of the latest in silico tools for stage appropriate risk assessment. For example, using machine learning-based data analysis and prediction for lead optimization and creating more manufacturable biologics

● Commonalities and idiosyncrasies of manufacturability/developability assessment across non-traditional formats – ADCs vs bispecifics vs mAbs vs fragments vs Fc fusions

● Translatability of manufacturability/developability risk assessment assays to preclinical and clinical readouts

Drug Development / CMC

● Considerations on how product and process-related quality attributes impact PK/PD, biodistribution/retention at subcutaneous dosing sites, immunogenicity, such as host cell protein analysis and strategies used in CQA assessments

● Practical considerations, novel strategies, and new technologies such as mass spectrometry used in generating evidence for CQAs assessment and process and product quality control

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

The deadline for the pre-submission enquiries is June 15, 2022, and the deadline for submission of the completed review articles is November 15, 2022.

Please send pre-submission inquiries to Editor-in-Chief Dr. Janice Reichert (reichert.biotechconsulting@gmail.com), and feel free to contact Assistant Editors Drs. Nathan Higginson-Scott (nathan.higginson-scott@seismictx.com), Feng Yang (yang.feng@gene.com) and Li Zhou (li.zhou@abbvie.com) if you have any questions.

Learn about Modeling Biologic Molecules on January 27th!

January 12, 2022 by Janice Reichert

Registration is open for our next webinar, “Modeling Biologic Molecules“, to be held Thursday January 27, 2022, 11am ET / 5pm CET.

The speakers are Dr. Monica Fernández-Quintero and Prof. Klaus R. Liedl.

Modeling in Chemistry obviously depends on a strong link to reality. Even though the mathematical description of chemistry has been possible for almost 100 years, realistic modelling has only recently become available due to the recent massive increase of computing power following Moore’s law. Still, appropriate statistics, initial conditions and boundaries pose considerable challenges. Nowadays, methodological advances and progress in hardware allows the observation of biological systems for relevant time periods. Hence, dynamic processes like reorientations, folding and binding can be seen in atomistic resolution leading to completely new insights.

Describing an antibody’s binding site using only one single static structure limits the understanding and characterization of the antibody’s function and properties, whereas various biophysical properties are governed by its dynamics, e.g., antibody-antigen binding. This limitation is even more pronounced when no experimentally determined structure is available or the crystal structure is distorted by packing effects, which can result in misleading antibody paratope structures. To improve antibody structure prediction and to take the strongly correlated CDR loop and interface movements into account, antibody paratopes should be described as interconverting states in solution with varying probabilities. These kinetically characterized paratope ensembles with their respective state probabilities allow the identification of the dominant conformation in solution, which frequently has been shown to coincide with the binding competent conformation. Therefore, the definition of kinetically and functionally relevant states, so-called paratope states, can be successfully used to improve the accuracy and enhance the predictivity of antibody-antigen docking.