Monoclonal antibody discovery
Therapeutic antibody therapy is well established. Therapeutic monoclonal antibodies are produced outside the body and administered parenterally. A major stumbling block in therapeutic antibody discovery is often the inability to generate potent antibodies, especially when the target antigen is complex in nature (GPCR's, ion-channels) and cannot be obtained as a structurally intact protein. Pepscan’s unique and proven protein mimicry technologies provide an elegant and effective way to arrive at superior immunogens for monoclonal antibodies especially against these complex targets.
Pepscan's approach for the generation of antibodies is based on gaining structural knowledge of the antigen and the subsequent synthesis of CLIPS peptide-based immunogens.
Our successful development of antibody therapeutics relies on the ability to:
- define precisely the antigens at the level of single amino acids
- adequately mimic the native secondary and tertiary structure of the antigen
- translate these CLIPS peptides into active and potent immunogens that induce the desired antibodies
This approach is suitable for every protein target, but is unique for "difficult-to-target" proteins, like membrane-integrated receptors (GPCRs, ion-channels), or certain viral proteins such as HIV. Our cutting-edge platform technologies are specifically designed to reconstruct such structurally complex binding sites. Pepscan’s synthetic immunogen platform has shown to be compatible with the well established antibody generation technologies like hybridoma and phage display approaches.