EpiVax entered a collaborative agreement to incorporate its immunogenicity screening technology into BioAtla’s antibody Express Humanization™ platform. EpiVax focuses on immunogenicity screening for protein therapeutics, immunogenicity mitigation, and T cell-driven vaccine design, using a suite of in silico tools. These tools are based on the EpiMatrix system. The ISPRI-HT, for high-throughput in silico analysis, screens and triages large numbers of antibodies for overall and relative immunogenic potential and identifies lower risk candidates to move forward, according to the company. EpiMatrix uses Tregitopes (T regulatory epitopes), an EpiVax discovery that is associated with regulatory T cell induction.
BioAtla’s Express Humanization entails synthesizing a combinatorial library of nonhuman target monoclonal antibodies fused in frame to a collection of human frameworks, and screening for binding, function, and expression. The firm said this approach allows for the selection of the most favorable combinations of fully human frameworks in terms of maintaining and improving the binding activity of the parental antibody without the need to make back mutations.
The addition of EpiVax high-throughput EpiMatrix analysis to the clone selection from BioAtla’s Express Humanization platform expands the functional selectivity of BioAtla’s expression-based humanization process by providing the third level clone selection criterion for developing human antibody therapeutics–immunogenicity.
In February, EpiVax collaborated with Novozymes Biopharma in a research agreement for the development of new methods for treating autoimmune diseases. The research agreement involved linking EpiVax’ Tregitope immune-modulating therapy for the treatment of type 1 diabetes, to Novozymes’ Albufuse® half-life extension platform, helping to enhance its pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties.