Teresa Barata, PhD, chief scientific officer at FairJourney Bio, spoke to Olivia Friett, editor of European Pharmaceutical Manufacturer, about The Antibody Series, held on 16–18 September in Évora, Portugal.
FairJourney Bio
What are the key themes that will shape this year's agenda?
The programme follows the sequence of a real discovery campaign: where antibodies come from, how they are designed, and what they become as a therapeutic. Wednesday opens on natural antibody repertoires, then on multispecificity, which is the question of what happens when one molecule is asked to do several jobs. Thursday moves to computational antibody design, and then to emerging antibody-based therapies in autoimmune disease. Friday closes on engineering agonism and next-generation therapeutic formats.
Autoimmune disease runs through the second half of the week. That is where a lot of this engineering is being taken first.
Are there any sessions or speakers you think would be particularly relevant to a pharmaceutical manufacturing audience?
Several, though not always the ones the titles would suggest.
Joanne Hulme is speaking on valency, multispecificity and geometry by design. Those three properties are what set chain-pairing complexity downstream, so that talk is a manufacturing conversation happening some years early.
Anna Wec is on Fc pairing fidelity for multiplexed mRNA antibody therapeutics, which is probably the one closest in relevance to the pharmaceutical manufacturing audience. Pairing fidelity is a purification question, and an encoded antibody moves where the manufacturing question sits in the first place.
Karyn O'Neil on tissue-specific delivery of Centyrin-siRNA conjugates, and Kurt Jenkins on masked T cell engager formats, both bring in features that someone eventually has to control: conjugation chemistry, masking domains, conditional activation.
Maria Pajuelo gives the FairJourney Bio lecture on single-domain antibodies. Different expression system, different cost base from a conventional IgG.
What topics do you expect will generate the most discussion or debate among attendees?
The relationship between the natural repertoire and computational design. Wednesday opens on lessons from natural antibody repertoires. Thursday's session is computational antibody design. Putting those two days next to each other is the discussion, and delegates will disagree about how far each approach carries you.
The second is engineering agonism, which opens Friday with Mark Cragg and Jo Viney. Agonism is one of the harder properties to build in on purpose, and there is more disagreement about how to approach it than the literature would suggest.
How do you see antibody development changing the future needs of pharma manufacturing?
Format heterogeneity is the main pressure. The platform process assumption held while most of the pipeline was a conventional IgG. A pipeline that also carries bispecifics with designed geometry, single-domain formats, masked engagers and antibody-oligonucleotide conjugates does not converge on one process, and each of those brings its own purification and analytical burden.
Two other shifts are worth watching. Conjugates bring oligonucleotide chemistry, and its supply chain, into the antibody world. And encoded approaches raise a question about where the protein manufacturing step sits, or whether it sits in the process at all for some indications.
The one I would flag hardest is scale. Robert Seder opens the meeting on a monoclonal antibody to prevent malaria, one of the few antibody programmes aimed at prevention at population scale. Prevention at that scale is a cost-of-goods and volume question before it is an immunology question. If antibodies are going to be used prophylactically rather than therapeutically, manufacturing economics becomes the constraint on whether the science is usable.