Specifica highlights research for its antibody discovery platform

By The Science Advisory Board staff writers

February 2, 2022 -- Specifica, a privately held antibody engineering company focused on in vitro antibody library and discovery tools, announced the publication of two peer-reviewed articles describing its Generation 3 Antibody Discovery Platform.

Antibodies are among the fastest-growing class of therapeutics, representing nine of the top 20 best-selling drugs. Traditionally, therapeutic antibodies have been generated by harvesting immune responses, either from inbred or transgenic mice, or from immune human subjects.

Although there has been a long-standing interest in using in vitro antibody library approaches that avoid the use of animals, there have been two main concerns with antibodies from in vitro libraries: One, binding affinities tend to be lower, and; two, poor developability characteristics are common, complicating their development as successful drugs. Specifica says it has overcome both of these concerns, according to a press release.

In a mAbs article, Specifica explains that its Gen 3 antibody libraries combine the use of well-behaved antibodies already validated in the clinic as frameworks with scaffold-compatible binding loop sequences from natural antibodies devoid of most sequence liabilities to improve developability.

In selection campaigns with the Gen 3 platform, both phage and yeast display are employed. The results, as described in the mAbs article, are a broad diversity of specific antibodies (100-1,000 different clusters) with high affinity (20% subnanomolar) and few developability issues, said Specifica.

The second article, published in Nature Communications, compared antibodies generated against SARS-CoV-2 using Specifica's Gen 3 platform with other antibodies described in the literature sourced from over 50 different laboratories. Specifica's Gen 3 antibodies outperformed all other antibodies sourced from naïve libraries, showed better performance than most immune-sourced antibodies, and were comparable to the very best immune SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in terms of affinity and viral neutralization, with developability properties as good as already approved antibodies, noted Specifica.


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