Late-stage drug discovery: Antibody discovery and engineering

Harness the power of our advanced antibody discovery platforms to accelerate your therapeutic development. From cancer to autoimmune disorders, we're here to transform your targets into ground-breaking treatments.

Elevate your late-stage development with advanced antibody solutions

Antibody discovery is a sophisticated process that employs advanced methodologies to identify and develop antibodies with specific binding affinities to target antigens. Successful campaigns lead to therapeutics for various diseases, including cancer, autoimmune disorders and infections, advancing personalized medicine and treatment efficacy. This process is equally effective in generating highly specific reagent antibodies for research purposes.

Understanding our antibody discovery and engineering approach

1Multi-pronged approach to lead candidate generation

Enzene employs a diverse strategy for antibody discovery, combining:

  • Conventional hybridoma technology
  • Patient-derived B-cell libraries
  • AI/ML-generated synthetic libraries
  • Display engineering

Libraries generated through these processes undergo rigorous selection to isolate sequences with the highest specificity and affinity for the target. AI/ML tools integrated at various screening stages accelerate lead candidate identification, enhancing efficiency and speed. After identification, antibodies are characterized through affinity maturation and epitope mapping to optimize binding and functionality. Advanced methods like X-ray crystallography or cryo-EM are used to elucidate antibody-antigen interactions at the atomic level.

Multi-pronged approach to lead candidate generation

2Display engineering for sequence optimization

Display engineering fine-tunes discovered antibody candidates to match desirable properties or “design goals,” improving drug characteristics such as target binding affinity, functionality and cross-species reactivity. Two key techniques in this field are phage display and yeast display, both of which excel in antibody engineering and sequence optimization:

Phage display:

  • Displays antibody fragments on bacteriophage surfaces
  • Screens large libraries (up to 10^9 variants)
  • Enables rapid identification of high-affinity antibodies
  • Facilitates affinity maturation and sequence optimization

Yeast display

  • Expresses full-length antibodies or fragments on yeast cell surfaces
  • Provides native post-translational modifications
  • Suitable for complex selections requiring mammalian protein folding
  • Used for affinity maturation and sequence optimization

3Lead candidate identification: Screening

This critical stage involves systematic evaluation of promising candidates using:

  • High-throughput screening technologies
  • Validation assays (in vitro and in vivo testing)
  • Advanced analytical techniques (mass spectrometry, surface plasmon resonance, functional assays)

Screening assays are utilized at multiple steps throughout the antibody discovery workflow to ensure the selection of the most promising candidates.

4Lead candidate evaluation

This step ensures that candidates possess desirable drug-like properties before advancing to preclinical and clinical development. The evaluation focuses on:

  • Activity and efficacy
  • Safety profile
  • Pharmacokinetics (PK)
  • Pharmacodynamics (PD)

5Continuum to pre-clinical and clinical development

Enzene offers a seamless transition from discovery to development:

  • Assessment of developability and manufacturability
  • Pre-clinical development
  • Clinical development (including GMP manufacturing)

This integrated approach allows clients to achieve top speed to the clinic with their lead candidates.

Join the CDMO revolution

Fueled by our continuous innovation and armed with EnzeneX™, our fully-integrated CDMO solutions and our biosimilars pipeline are designed to help bring your biologics innovations to life.