The biotech bi-weekly
Hello and welcome to this inaugural edition of the Biotech bi-weekly, a fortnightly listicle bringing you a rapid review of the latest happenings and developments in the biotech industry! As ever, we would love to hear your thoughts on this feature and how we could update it to be as useful as possible, so if you have any pointers, please contact me at [email protected].
Now, on with the update!
Products: New services for bispecific antibody screening and prototyping
Bio-Rad (CA, USA), a product provider for life science research and clinical diagnostics, has added the rapid generation and screening of bispecific antibodies to its suite of Pioneer™ Antibody Discovery Platform services.
This new service relies on their proprietary SpyLock Technology, which utilizes the Pioneer Platform’s phage display library of 225 billion Fab antibodies, in concert with SpyDisplay. SpyDisplay is a phage display method involving protein ligation rather than genetically fusing the displayed protein to a phage-coat protein.
In an exciting use case, the technology has been used in a partnership with Salipro Biotech (Stockholm, Sweden) to identify high-quality antibody candidates to target challenging GPCRs. So far, the collaboration has already produced several novel human antibodies with greater affinities to one of the GPCR targets than the current first-in-class antibody. This demonstrates the platform’s ability to highlight new antibodies with promising functional activity for novel immuno-oncology therapeutics.
Read the full release here >>>
Evolving an antibody: innovation in therapeutic antibody design
Michael Weiner, founder of AbbraTech (CT, USA), discusses his novel approach to antibody development, the current sticking points in the field of antibody therapeutics and the innovative approaches that are being used to overcome them.
Partnerships: High-precision sequencing brings new capabilities to genomic services lab
Novogene (Beijing China) and PacBio (CA, USA) have formed a partnership to support new breakthroughs in cancer, rare disease and environmental research across the European scientific community.
The partnership means that Novogene, a provider of genomic services and bioinformatics expertise, will now be utilizing PacBio’s Revio long-read sequencing system at its new lab in the Innovation and Start-Up Center for Biotechnology (IZB; Munich, Germany).
According to Novogene’s Vice President, Tingting Zhou, the utilization of Revio technology will enable the lab to expand the capabilities of its services to create, “new opportunities for our customers to advance their groundbreaking research… due to the sequencer’s ability to uncover complex repetitive regions, structural variants, and novel isoforms that are typically missed by short-read and exome methods.”
Read the full release here >>>
Business of BioTechniques 2024
This feature highlights the latest news and industry collaborations, from products and services to important upcoming events and key information in the biotech industry.
People and publications: A new CCO to propel novel gene therapy to commercial success
Precigen, Inc. (MD, USA), a cell and gene therapy focused biopharmaceutical company, has appointed Phil Tennant as the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, who has been tasked with driving commercial readiness for the potential launch of their gene therapy for respiratory papillomatosis.
With an illustrious international career, featuring positions around the globe at Merck (NJ, USA), AstraZeneca (Cambridge, UK) and Bristol Myers Squib (NY, USA), and his last 13 years of experience in the therapeutic oncology market, Tennant brings significant expertise to the launch of this oncology-adjacent therapeutic.
Commenting on his appointment, President and CEO of Precigen Helen Sabzevari commented that, “Phil’s expertise is precisely tailored to propel our first potential commercial launch in the US. Phil’s relationships with our target prescriber base will enable rapid growth in our key markets, enabling access to our potential life-changing RRP therapy for patients who urgently need it.”
