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.

Specifica transfers antibody discovery platform to Bayer
Specifica announced the transfer of its Generation 3 antibody libraries to Bayer under an agreement that will enable the company to develop antibody-based...