Distributed Bio’s human monoclonal antibody library SuperHuman 2.0 has attracted interest from Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim, both of which have licensed it for drug discovery.
A Johnson & Johnson JLABS resident, Distributed Bio analyzed thousands of human immune systems with its machine learning platform called AbGenesis to have produced the SuperHuman library with 76 billion antibodies, including over 5,000 hits against each of the 26 targets in immuno-oncology and neurodegeneration within Distributed Bio’s pipeline, said company co-founder and CSO Jacob Glanville in a statement.
“Given the number of hits, this library can be panned under unprecedented aggressive conditions, recovering hundreds of subnanomolar binders in under a week, recovering saturating coverage of hits against every epitope, and isolating multi-species cross-reactive members against target homologs without additional engineering,” the company said in an introduction.
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Through two separate agreements, Pfizer and Boehringer will use the platform to screen and identify antibodies for use as therapeutic agents, and they have also obtained continued access to future, improved versions of the platform. Distributed Bio in return will get undisclosed amounts of annual licensing fees and future payments linked to specified milestones.
In another deal formed with Pandion Therapeutics a month ago, instead of licensing out the entire platform right away, Distributed Bio sold a few existing lead candidates and will run SuperHuman to discover other antibodies against Pandion-selected targets.
Pandion co-founder and CEO Anthony Coyle, Ph.D., said in a statement at the time that SuperHuman “provides Pandion with the fastest path to novel therapeutics.”
Distributed Bio is also offering AbGenesis, the cloud-based computational platform it uses to build SuperHuman, as an external service. Built in 2012, the platform helped the biotech become profitable in the first year without the help of venture funding, according to the company. It is used by over 35 institutions and biotech companies, including seven of the 10 top pharma.