Antiverse signs pharma partnership to identify antibody drug candidates
Biotechnology company Antiverse will work with a major pharmaceutical company to help it identify antibody drug candidates.
Antiverse has developed a computational antibody drug discovery platform which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help companies identify potential drug candidates. The platform combines machine learning and phage display techniques to model antibody-antigen interactions. The current version of the platform uses next generation sequencing and AI to provide diverse antibody candidates for any given target.
Antiverse’s recent partnership has already seen the company be successful in identifying antibody candidates for a target of interest, with greater diversity (2.3x) and accuracy compared to alternative bioinformatics pipeline selection methods.
Antiverse was able to identify 248 sequences using its platform, 230 of which were antibody binders. Five of these antibody candidates were found to be cross-reactive.
Currently, Antiverse is developing the platform to help with the development of drugs for difficult targets associated with cancer, heart and lung diseases. The company hopes the platform can overcome typical limitations in drug screening such as overcoming amplification bias which leads to diversity loss and selection bias which results in the loss of unique antibodies.
Murat Tunaboylu, chief executive officer of Antiverse, said: “We are pleased to collaborate with a top 20 pharma company on this discovery project. Our AI-powered antibody drug discovery platform successfully identified more binders with better diversity to state-of-the-art high-throughput colony picking and bioinformatics pipeline selection. Researchers can find more diverse antibodies by unlocking the full potential of their library/discovery process with our AI-augmented discovery platform and through our fee-for-service offering, we hope to partner with other biotech and pharma companies on projects to identify other challenging targets.”