200 Reasons to Celebrate!
Here at Fusion Antibodies, we’re celebrating our 200th Antibody Humanisation project, cementing our place as a leading CRO in antibody engineering services.
“This 200th Humanisation milestone is a wonderful achievement and I’m delighted for all of these projects which we have successfully completed,” says Paul Kerr, CEO of Fusion Antibodies.
Many therapeutic antibodies start off as a non-human animal antibody and are “humanised” to avoid generating an immune response. Since the Fusion Antibodies adventure started in 2001, we have expanded the number of antibody engineering services we offer. All of this has grown from our core expertise in antibody humanisation.
In 2012 we crystallised our know-how into our proprietary CDRx™️ platform, combining our laboratory experience with powerful in silico techniques. We graft the residues responsible for affinity from the animal parent antibody onto carefully selected mature human donor frameworks that we know to be stable and express well. We know exactly which residues are key to maintaining structure and function and our in silico phase screens out sequence liabilities that can impact stability, immunogenicity, expression, and manufacturing.
Using our CDRx™️ platform, we provide our clients with a 25-variant panel of humanised antibodies that retain the affinity of the parent antibody and that are development-ready. At least a third of antibodies from our earlier humanisation projects have entered clinical trials and we’re looking forward to following the trajectory of our newer projects.
“I look forward to the next 200 projects and working with drug developers around globe to create better drugs to unmet medical needs,” says Kerr.
We work with a range of customers, from small academic groups to small biotech start-ups, all the way up to big pharmaceutical companies, and many of our customers return for repeat business. Our customers have brought us antibodies from mice, rats, chicken, llamas and birds. They have brought us full antibodies, scFvs and Fabs. And we’re proud to say that every project has finished with a successfully humanised antibody with affinity within a 2-fold difference from the parent antibody. That isn’t our only guarantee. Other CROs offer a “success or your money back” service. We go a step further, and guarantee a successfully humanised antibody, full stop. We keep going until we have a panel of humanised variants with comparable affinity to the parent antibody. We won’t give up after one attempt, like many of our competitors, or offer your money back. We promise to keep going until we have succeeded.
“I feel proud to have developed such a robust antibody humanization platform, that consistently provides highly manufacturable antibodies to our clients. I am confident that some of the antibodies Fusion has designed will soon be marketed worldwide for the benefit of human healthcare.” says Dr Richard Buick, Chief Technical Officer of Fusion Antibodies.
The success of Fusion’s approach is down to a carefully cultivated mix of experience, curiosity and innovation. “Innovation is in our DNA at Fusion Antibodies,” says Kerr, “We will continue to improve our CDRx™️ platform with machine learning and AI.”
