Industrializing Immuno-Oncology Therapeutic Discovery Platforms

PEGS Europe, Barcelona, Spain
November 4, 2021

Background and novelty: Diverse classes of large molecules are currently used in cancer immunotherapy. New bi- and multi-specific antibodies, Ab-cytokine fusion proteins, non-Ig scaffolds, chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), engineered T-cell receptors (TCRs) and TCR-based bispecific constructs offer promising approaches as cancer treatments. These highly engineered molecules also pose new challenges in their complex design and production, either as dedicated molecules or in the context of cellular therapeutics (e.g., CAR T cells). Efficient workflow infrastructure is vital for research and development (R&D) of these therapeutics at industrial scale.

Experimental approach: We have designed a combined R&D platform, which represents a highly structured database transforming the complexity of molecule design, screening, and production processes into organized workflow steps. Efficient molecule assembly mechanisms have been created to design large panels of novel biomolecules. Tools for pooled cloning deconvolution and chain pairing recovery have been implemented. The platform was designed to support screening of the best candidates and of the best-producer cell lines via built-in tools for developability assessment.

Results and discussion: We present concrete use cases supporting large molecule and cellular therapeutics R&D, end-to-end. Our special focus is on in silico molecule assembly, on mono- to multispecific activity comparisons, developability assessments, and on the development and evaluation of CAR T cell lines. The platform shows unmatched flexibility in handling and exploring novel therapeutic modalities and supports increased efficiency and speed in their development, among other benefits.