The Antibody Society

the official website of the antibody society

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

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Grad/PostDoc Poster Awards presented at Antibody Engineering &Therapeutics

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Congratulations to our 2018 Graduate Student and Post-doctoral Poster Award winners! An award ceremony was held on December 12th at the Society’s annual meeting, Antibody Engineering &Therapeutics, to recognize the recipients. The winners were:

Junpeng Qi (Postdoctoral Associate, The Scripps Research Institute). Poster title: Potent and selective antitumor activity of a T cell-engaging bispecific antibody targeting a membrane-proximal epitope of ROR1.

Pietro Sormanni (Borysiewicz Biomedical Sciences Fellow (postdoctoral), University of Cambridge). Poster title: Third generation antibody discovery: In silico rational design.

Madeleine Jennewein (Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University). Poster title: Trans-placental antibody transfer selects for highly functional antibodies.


Junpeng Qi – Scripps Research Institute (The Rader Lab)

“I would to thank The Antibody Society for giving me this award. It is a great opportunity, especially for a young scientist, to get the latest progress in antibody engineering and therapeutics, and to be connected with the excellent scientists in the antibody field. From this impressive annual meeting I learned that we can do amazing science with antibodies and develop fantastic antibody therapeutics benefiting patients as well.”

Pietro Sormanni – University of Cambridge (The Vendruscolo Lab)

“I am immensely grateful to The Antibody Society for selecting my application, and even more for organizing this award. This award has given me the opportunity to attend this terrific meeting, to learn about world-class research in both industry and academia, and more importantly to share and discuss my own work with leading scientists from across the world. I would like to stress the importance of the existence of awards such as this, and I call for the Society and the sponsors of the meeting to make available more of these awards and travel grants to early career researchers. Because at the end of the day, the growing community of postdoctoral researchers and graduate students is the engine that powers biomedical research, certainly in academia, and increasingly also in industry. And these travel grants provide us with the unique opportunity to get out of the lab, come to these meetings and greatly expand our research horizons, and generate new ideas. So I hope to see a bit more space dedicated to early career researchers in future editions of this meeting, thank you all for your attention, and again to The Antibody Society for this award.”

Madeleine F Jennewein – Harvard University (The Alter Lab)

Madeleine Jennewein was unexpectedly unable to join us at the meeting in San Diego, but we thank her for her participation and wish her the best with her work.

The Antibody Society at Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics 2018

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The Antibody Society held its 2018 annual meeting at Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics in San Diego on December 9-13. It was a a great opportunity for the board members and volunteers to meet our society members and provide updates on Society initiatives.

Informative keynote addresses were given by Prof. Andreas Plückthun (University of Zurich), Prof. David Baker (University of Washington), Prof. Rachael Clark (Harvard Medical School) and Dr. Badrul Chowdhury (Medimmune).

One of the highlights of the conference was the Antibodies to Watch in 2019 presentation by Dr. Janice Reichert (Executive Director of TAbS and Editor-in-Chief of mAbs).


The ‘Antibodies to watch in 2019’ paper is currently online in the accepted (manuscript) form. Society members will be informed when the final article, which will be open access, is available.

The Antibody Society booth at Antibody Engineering &Therapeutics

Winners of the Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics Student/Postdoc Poster Competition

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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 3 student/postdocs 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:

Madeleine Jennewein (Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University). Poster title: Trans-placental antibody transfer selects for highly functional antibodies

Junpeng Qi (Postdoctoral Associate, The Scripps Research Institute. Poster title: Potent and selective antitumor activity of a T cell-engaging bispecific antibody targeting a membrane-proximal epitope of ROR1

Pietro Sormanni (Borysiewicz Biomedical Sciences Fellow (postdoctoral), University of Cambridge). Poster title: Third generation antibody discovery: In silico rational design

Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics, the annual meeting of The Antibody Society, is managed by KNect365. The meeting will be held December 10-13, 2018 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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Sanne van de Bovenkamp wins The Antibody Society’s first Award for Excellence!

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Stimulating scientific exchange and education represent important aims of The Antibody Society. The Society therefore supports conferences in the antibody field through financial means and by providing scientific programming advice. The recognition of young and upcoming scientists with an Award for Excellence for best abstracts and presentations is a new Society initiative.

The Society’s first Award for Excellence was presented at the Waddensymposium, Antibodies: Central Players in Therapy and Disease, which was held June 25-26, 2018 in the remote town of Ouddorp in The Netherlands. An independent jury consisting of Prof. Stephen Beers (University of Southampton) and Dr. René Pfeiffle (University of Erlangen) selected Sanne van de Bovenkamp as the overall winner. The jury indicated that they were not only highly impressed by the quality of Sanne’s presentation but also by her demonstrated ability to engage in an insightful scientific discussion.

In her presentation, Sanne described her recent work on the impact of Fab-domain glycosylation in the adaptive antibody response. Her studies demonstrate that Fab-domain glycosylation is subject to clonal selection and impacts on antibody affinity. Sanne performed her graduate work at Sanquin Research with Dr. Theo Rispens.  She is currently a postdoc at the department of Immunohematology and Blood Transfusion at the Leiden University Medical Center in Leiden with Prof. Leendert Trouw. She is pictured here with Society Board of Director’s member Dr. Paul W.H.I. Parren and Prof. Beers.

Post-translational Modification in Antibody Function

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The Antibody Society is pleased to invite you to attend its annual Meeting, Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics, which will be held December 12-15, 2017, in San Diego, CA. We will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Society at the Society’s Special Session on Thursday December 14, 2017. In this session summary, Dennis R. Burton (The Scripps Research Institute) and Paul W.H.I. Parren (Leiden University Medical Center) discuss what you will learn in their session on post-translational modification in antibody function.

The critical importance of sequence variation in antibodies is well recognized. Sequence diversity in antibody variable domains is essential for specific antigen recognition while linkage to different constant domains leads to distinct Fc-mediated effector activities. Post-translational modifications (PTMs) of these domains provide an additional immune mechanism by which the binding and activity of antibodies can be modulated. PTMs vary from chain additions, such as N- and O-linked glycosylation, glycation, cysteinylation and sulfation; chain trimming, such as C-terminal lysine clipping; amino acid modifications such as cyclization (into a N-terminal pyroglutamic acid), deamidation, oxidation, isomerization and carbamylation; to disulfide scrambling of hinge region interchain disulfide bonds. Each antibody can therefore give rise to a myriad of distinct antibody molecules with large activity and potency differences. Although post-translational modifications of antibodies have been observed and studied for decades, we only now start to understand the full impact of this incredible microheterogeneity. PTMs have moved from being viewed as a mere nuisance to antibody manufacturing that requires controlling to a potential handle to modify and improve specific antibody functions.

In this session, we will hear about current state-of-the-art in PTM detection and novel insights into the role and modulation of PTMs in our immune system as well as the way in which we can exploit PTMs to make better (therapeutic) antibodies. The first and the second (after the break) part of our session will be initiated with lectures by renowned experts in their fields. Professor Albert Heck (Utrecht University) is a world-expert on the structural analysis of proteins by mass spectrometry. He received the Frank H. Field and Joe L. Franklin Award for outstanding achievement in mass spectrometry from the American Chemical Society and in 2017 he was received the NWO Spinoza Prize, which is the highest award in Dutch Science. Prof Heck will discuss how innovative and advanced mass spectrometry methods can be used to map antibody heterogeneity due to PTMs. Leendert Trouw (Leiden University Medical Center) will discuss the role of two amino acid modifications (citrullination and carbamylation) in the autoimmune disease rheumatoid arthritis (RA). On the one hand, the presence of antibodies against citrullinated or carbamylated proteins represents a prognostic marker for the disease. How antibodies recognize diverse antigens carrying these modifications is therefore an important area of study. Carbamylation of antibodies furthermore may also have functional consequences for antibody effector functions which will be highlighted. Professor Gerhard Krönke (University of Erlangen) will discuss how the PTM profile and inflammatory activity of autoantibodies in RA is regulated by TH17 helper T cells. His work gives us a novel insight into a mechanism by which the cellular immune system regulates the activity of antibodies and how its derailment may lead to the initiation of (autoimmune) disease.

After the break, Taia Wang (Stanford University School of Medicine) will discuss the diverse downstream proinflammatory, anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory consequences of the engagement of type I and type II Fc receptors, which are influenced by the Fc’s amino acid sequence and the complex, biantennary Fc-associated N-linked glycan, in the context of infectious, autoimmune, and neoplastic disorders. Yingda Xu (Adimab) will bring us back to the importance of PTMS in manufacturing and control of therapeutic antibody production. He will show novel data on the identification of chemically labile sites in antibodies and how this information may be used in therapeutic antibody lead selection. Finally, Raiees Andrabi (The Scripps Research Institute) will discuss how sulfation of residues in the antibody binding site is critical for certain broadly neutralizing anti-HIV-1 antibodies targeting the envelope glycoprotein.

We hope that this session will convey the current interest and high excitement in antibody PTMs and will serve to promote further research into the importance and impact of PTM microheterogeneity for polyclonal antibody responses as well as for monoclonal antibody therapeutics.

 

Interested in attending the meeting? Learn more from this PDF, which includes all session summaries written by the chairpersons.

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