The Antibody Society

the official website of the antibody society

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

  • LOG IN
  • BECOME A MEMBER
  • About
    • Mission & Activities
    • Directors and Officers
    • Marketing & Promotions
    • The Antibody Society’s Committees
      • Meetings Committee
      • AIRR Community Working Groups & Sub-Committees
    • Sponsors & Partners
  • Society meetings
    • Computational Antibody Discovery: State of the Art
      • Computational Antibody Discovery Symposium Participants
    • Harnessing Cytokines for Cancer Immunotherapy Symposium
    • Biopharmaceutical Informatics Symposium
    • Emerging Cancer Therapies Leveraging Gamma-Delta Effector T cells Symposium
    • Emerging Immunotherapeutics for Ovarian Cancer Symposium
    • AIRR Community Meetings
    • Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics (US) 2024
      • 2022 Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics
      • 2020 Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics
      • 2019 Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics
      • 2018 Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics
      • What is INN a Name?
        • INN issue updates
    • Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics Europe 10 – 12 June, 2025 | Congress Center, Basel Switzerland.
      • Scientific Advisors, Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics Europe
    • FOCIS Symposia
  • AIRR Community
    • AIRR Community News
    • AIRR Community Newsletter
    • AIRR Community Seminar Series
    • AIRR Community Meetings
      • Zooming into the Community III
      • AIRR Community Meeting VII – Learnings and Perspectives
      • AIRR Community Special Event 2023  – Zooming in to the Community II
      • AIRR Community Meeting VI: “Exploring New Frontiers”
      • AIRR Community Meeting V: “Zooming in to the AIRR Community”
      • AIRR Community Meeting V Pre-Meetings
        • AIRR-seq in the Pandemic
        • AIRR-seq Biological Standards and Workflows
      • AIRR Community Special Event: “Response to COVID-19”
      • AIRR Community Meeting IV: “Bridging the Gaps”
      • AIRR Community Meeting III
        • Day 1
        • Day 2
        • Day 3
        • Day 4
      • AIRR Community Meeting II
      • AIRR Community Meeting I
    • On AIRR – An AIRR Community Podcast
    • AIRR Data Commons
    • AIRR-C Germline Database Resources
    • AIRR Community Publications
    • AIRR Community Working Groups
      • Biological Resources Working Group
      • Common Repository Working Group
      • Diagnostics Working Group
      • Germline Database Working Group
      • Legal and Ethics Working Group
      • Software Working Group
      • Standards Working Group
    • AIRR Community Sub-Committees
      • Communications Sub-Committee
      • Executive Sub-Committee
      • Inferred Allele Review Committee
      • Meetings Sub-Committee
      • Strategic Planning Sub-Committee
    • AIRR Community Webinar Series
    • AIRR Community Calendar
    • AIRR Community Resources
  • Members only
    • Login
    • Note to members
    • Member discount codes
    • 2025 Calendar of Events
    • James S. Huston Antibody Science Talent Award
      • 2024 James S. Huston Antibody Science Talent Award Recipient
      • 2023 James S. Huston Antibody Science Talent Award Recipient
      • 2022 James S. Huston Antibody Science Talent Award Recipient
      • 2021 James S. Huston Antibody Science Talent Award Recipient
      • 2020 James S. Huston Antibody Science Talent Award Recipient
      • Huston Award submission guidelines
    • Research Competitions
      • Research Competition Winners
    • Science Writing Competition
      • Science Writing Competition Winners
    • Imaging Competition
      • Imaging Calendar Competition winners
        • The Antibody Society 2025 Calendar
        • The Antibody Society 2024 Calendar
    • Antibodies in early-stage studies
    • Presentations
  • Upcoming meetings in 2025
  • Web Resources
    • Society Publications
    • Antibody News
    • Antibody News Podcast
    • Antibody therapeutics approved or in regulatory review in the EU or US
      • Antibody therapeutics product data
    • Antibodies in late-stage clinical studies
    • Research Resources
    • Education Resources
  • Career Center
    • Career Shorts
  • Learning Center
    • Upcoming Webinars in 2025
    • The Antibody Series Lectures
    • Antibody Discovery & Development
    • Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoires
    • Antibodies to Watch
    • Commercializing Antibody Therapeutics
    • Antibody Validation
      • 4th International Antibody Validation Meeting, Sep 2023
    • Snakebite antivenoms: Global challenges and progress toward recombinant antibody therapeutics
You are here: Home / Archives for financing

Advice for Entrepreneurs

April 8, 2022 by The Antibody Society

Do you have a great idea for a new biopharmaceutical company, but need advice on how to start one?

Excedr has numerous informative articles geared towards budding startup founders. Topics include company formation, legal basics, finance basics, common founder mistakes, lab operations, and IP rights and strategy. Expand your knowledge base here:

Starting an R&D Company? Tips for Founding a New Biotech


Laying the Legal Groundwork

  • Do You Need a Co-founder for Your Startup?
  • Naming Your Startup

Should You Incorporate Your Biotech Startup in Delaware?

Business Entities: LLC vs. S-Corp vs. C-Corp

Why Do VCs Prefer C-Corporations?

How to Write a Business Plan for Your Life Sciences Startup

Writing a Lean Plan for Your Life Sciences Startup

A Guide to Starting a Diagnostics Outfit or CRO

We hope this advice is helpful – Good luck!

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs, Finance, Venture capital Tagged With: financing, start-up

Funding the Development of Antibody Innovations, Part 1: Entrepreneurial Antibody Scientists

May 19, 2021 by The Antibody Society

By Tom Burt (Partner, Sofinnova Partners) & Nick Hutchinson (BSG Lead, Mammalian Cell Culture, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies)

The Antibody Society has partnered with Tom Burt, Partner at Sofinnova Partners, a leading European venture capital firm in life sciences, specializing in healthcare and sustainability to produce a 4-part series of articles explaining the basics of financing a start-up biotech company. Our aim is to support and inspire researchers working in labs with a passion for their science and the drive to push their ideas as far as they will go. In Part 1, we discuss the characteristics of the entrepreneurial antibody scientist.

As of 2021, the pipeline of therapeutic antibodies is strong and the biopharmaceutical industry is enjoying unprecedented success in bringing new products to market (1). The launch of new antibody drugs can have a tremendous impact on the lives of patients suffering from diseases for which there are either no existing treatments or current treatments are lacking. Technological developments, such as Fc engineering, bi- and multi-specific antibody formats and antibody-drug conjugates will lead to improved antibody treatments in the future. Not all advances in antibody science are new drugs, however, and many are leading to new enabling research tools and novel diagnostics. The amount of innovation in the sector, driven by creative scientists working in labs around the world, is startling.

Scientists developing antibody therapeutics must progress the idea through discovery and development phases, including preclinical and clinical testing, with various regulatory hurdles that must be navigated before commercial launch can take place. Large pharma and biotech companies are well versed in managing the complexity and costs of antibody development and commercialization, but there is always room in the market for smaller, more agile players who can compete on an equal footing with these giants.

Entrepreneurial scientists are eschewing the traditional career pathways of staying in academia or joining large pharma companies (2) in favor of establishing their own companies. They are raising money to finance discovery and development, while managing their biotech businesses in order to turn their ideas into a reality. By adopting this approach, founders can retain much greater control of their inventions, can align the development of their technology with their own values, and furthermore, stand to benefit financially if their candidate is shown to be successful.

“It’s an excellent time to be considering raising finance for biotech start-ups. Investors have lots of capital that is waiting to be deployed and society is re-considering how it values medtech innovations in light of the pandemic,” explained Tom.

Investors’ attitudes to these different types of start-up will vary depending on the size of the investment that the company will need, the level of risk associated with the investment, the size of the likely return and the time it will take to see a return. Raising finance for different types of antibody start-up companies will depend on the business model and the nature of the innovation being commercialized. A technology for antibody discovery embedded in a piece of equipment will differ from an amino acid sequence that can be licensed, which will differ from an antibody therapeutic requiring ten years and hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars before any revenues are generated.

“Investors in therapeutics are very wary of “one-trick ponies” with only a single drug candidate,” says Tom. “We look for companies with innovative technologies that might be applied to a number of candidates for multiple disease targets. This reduces risks by ensuring the start-up can have multiple shots on goal.”

One such example is the start-up antibody company Gigagen, which was recently acquired by Grifols, a specialist in plasma-derived medicine. Gigagen’s Magnify Platform enables the identification of rare novel targets within the tumor microenvironment, which in turn can be fed into its Surge Platform, allowing the production of recombinant polyclonal antibodies derived from mammalian repertoires. The company has an oncology pipeline containing monoclonal and bispecific antibodies and a recombinant polyclonal immunoglobulin pipeline, which includes treatments for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

Like other start-up biotechs, Gigagen had licensed these platforms technologies to other antibody discovery and development companies in order to generate early revenues, before using them as a springboard to launch their own candidate development programmes.

In the next three posts in this series, we’ll explain the start-up financing cycle and how it relates to antibody companies, especially those developing antibody products for therapeutic use. We’ll use industry examples to describe different types of investors in antibody innovations, what they look for in a company or idea, and their expectations as to how the funding is utilized. We will also explain how the funding cycle is changing, which will help inventors fund the clinical journey more easily.

Watch for our second post next week!

1.       Kaplon H & Reichert JM (2021) Antibodies to watch in 2021. mAbs.

2.       Friedman J. How Biotech Startup Funding Will Changing in the Next 10 Years.

 

Filed Under: Antibody discovery, Finance, Venture capital Tagged With: financing, funding, Gigagen, venture capital

mabs

mabs

The Official Journal of The Antibody Society

Career Center

Our Career Center is a premier resource to connect highly qualified talent with matching career opportunities. Visit for details on over 800 jobs!

AIRR Community

AIRR Community

The Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire Community is a research-driven group organizing around the use of high-throughput sequencing technologies to study antibody/B-cell and T-cell receptor repertoires.

Recent Posts

  • Zooming into the Community III Starts Tomorrow! May 20, 2025
  • Exciting news – The AIRR Community is turning 10! 🎂 May 8, 2025
  • The Antibody Society (TAbS): Win a FREE Attendance Pass to AET Basel & Present A Poster: Call For Abstracts! March 26, 2025

Archives

Follow us online

  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Home
  • Privacy & Terms of Use
  • About
  • Directors and Officers
  • Advisors
  • Sponsors & Partners
  • Mission & Activities
  • Join the Society
  • Membership Levels
  • Members only
  • Login
  • Antibody therapeutics approved or in regulatory review in the EU or US
  • Meeting reports
  • Presentations
  • Contact

©2015 - scicomvisuals