Abalone Bio, which is a therapeutics biotech company that distinctively measures and also makes utmost use of large-scale activity datasets in order to discover rare activating antibodies to successfully drug the challenging targets, went ahead and announced a research collaboration along with Pfizer. As per the agreement, Abalone Bio is going to apply its Functional Antibody Selection Technology – FAST platform to go ahead and discover G-protein coupled receptor – GPCR activity-modulating antibodies for a steep collaboration target. The collaboration is all set to make utmost use of Abalone Bio’s functional and high-throughput screening capacities in order to generate antibodies, which are going to be assessed by Pfizer.
According to Richard Yu, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Abalone Bio, the FAST platform’s capability to generate functionally active GPCR antibodies goes on to present an opportunity to push boundaries of rare activating antibodies discovery, and they believe that this partnership could also unlock new approaches when it comes to potential treatments for diseases having high unmet need, through targeting biology in a way that has long been regarded as intractable.
It is well to be noted that GPCRs are large and dynamic membrane proteins that need accurate structural adjustments in order to modulate their activities. Antibody agonists for GPCRs can provide specificity and also functionality that’s beyond what the present drugs offer, but discovering them still remains quite a pressing challenge. The FAST platform helps with direct measurement of functional activity of umpteen antibodies within a single experiment. These large-scale functional datasets quite distinctly fuel the proprietary AI-powered workflow of Abalone Bio in order to identify GPCR agonists without any kind of external data, like structural information. Unlike the traditional antibody discovery methods, which apparently focus on binding affinity, the approach by Abalone makes use of engineered cells in order to directly measure the antibody function at a scale that’s unmatched in order to produce the large-scale and quality data that’s required.
As per the terms of the agreement, both companies are going to contribute resources to the discovery and screening as well as assessment when it comes to the antibodies. All financial along with operational details remain confidential.
