Multiple Solutions of Functional Leads Discovery and Engineering

Functional screening is the most crucial step for the early-stage therapeutic antibody discovery. Currently, most of antibody lead discovery strategy starts with screening for binders, followed by functional characterization with purified antibody. This process provides a comprehensive screening funnel to narrow down the candidates list via a step-by-step fashion. However, functional clone only takes a very small fraction among common binders. This workflow not only takes quite some time, but also leads to huge waste of resources spent on those non-functional binders. In this talk, we will discuss functional screening solutions that can be applied onto mainstream antibody discovery platforms, to overcome this issue and significantly improve the process efficiency.

Statistics shows that only one out of 25 therapeutic antibody pipelines can survive the preclinical development and clinical study, before making its way to the market. In order to outperform among dozens even hundreds of competitors, “me-better” can be achieved through functionality and developability optimization, the two cornerstones of therapeutic antibody. A variety of antibody engineering tools can be used to improve these two features. In this talk, we will discuss the strategy and share case study data of four major engineering strategies: humanization, affinity maturation, developability optimization, and Fc engineering.