FARGO, N.D.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aldevron, a leading provider of antibody discovery and production services, today announced the successful discovery of human antibodies utilizing the combination of three powerful platforms, Aldevron’s GENOVAC® genetic immunization and cell-based screening, Ligand’s OmniRat® therapeutic antibody platform and Berkeley Lights Beacon® Optofluidic platform.
This discovery makes Aldevron the first user of the Berkeley Lights Platform to successfully isolate and screen OmniRat cells on the Beacon system, enabling a very novel and unique approach to the rapid discovery of human antibodies. Aldevron selected three COVID-19 targets—the full-length spike, spike receptor binding domain, and ACE2—for these targets, which are also available for a commercial partner.
“Aldevron’s GENOVAC platform has delivered advanced antibody discovery solutions, including genetic immunization, for the most difficult targets for over 20 years,” said Brian Walters, President of Aldevron’s Antibody Discovery Business Unit. “We are excited to offer our clients the most innovative and diverse approaches to the discovery of antibodies against the most challenging targets, which now includes the combination of very powerful technologies of genetic immunization, the Beacon, and the most diverse array of animal species in the industry.”
Ligand’s OmniRat is the first transgenic rat for generation of human antibodies. The ability to screen humanized and wild type rat cells allows Aldevron to support their clients in producing highly sought-after diversified therapeutic antibody repertoires.
“Aldevron has successfully demonstrated the power of the Berkeley Lights Beacon instrument for single cell-based screening of antibody repertoire from Ligand’s immunized OmniRat animals. Together with its GENOVAC genetic immunization platform, Aldevron will provide OmniAb® licensees with a state-of-the-art process combining efficient platforms to rapidly isolate a diverse and large panel of antibodies even against the most difficult targets,” said Christel Iffland, Ph.D., Ligand’s Vice President of Antibody Technologies.
Aldevron acquired the Beacon platform in June 2019, to complement its industry-leading genetic immunization and hybridoma capabilities. Aldevron immediately focused on the development of cell-based assays allowing the combination its genetic immunization and Beacon instrument to facilitate rapid antibody discovery against the most difficult targets.
“We are excited to see Aldevron leveraging our Opto Plasma B Antibody Discovery workflow to expand their product offering to include the OmniRat animals for their customers,” said John Proctor, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Berkeley Lights. “Our goal is to enable rapid selection of diverse therapeutic candidates and it’s great to see Aldevron achieve this in the fight against COVID-19.”
“We’re very grateful for the support provided by Ligand and Berkeley Lights throughout the development and screening processes” added Walters. “We look forward to enhancing our support to Ligand’s OmniAb licensees with our single B cell service.”
About Aldevron
Aldevron serves the biotechnology industry with custom production of nucleic acids, proteins, and antibodies. Thousands of clients use Aldevron-produced plasmids, RNA and gene editing enzymes for projects ranging from research grade to clinical trials to commercial applications. Aldevron specializes in GMP manufacturing and is known for inventing the GMP-Source® quality system. Company headquarters are in Fargo, N.D., with additional facilities in Madison, Wisc., and Freiburg, Germany. For more information visit https://www.aldevron.com/.
About OmniAb®
OmniAb is Ligand’s three-species transgenic-animal platform consisting of five different technologies used for producing mono- and bispecific human therapeutic antibodies. OmniRat® animals comprise the industry’s first human monoclonal antibody technology based on rats. Because they have a complete immune system with a diverse antibody repertoire, OmniRat animals generate antibodies with human idiotypes as effectively as wild-type animals make rat antibodies. OmniMouse® is a transgenic mouse that complements OmniRat and expands epitope coverage. OmniFlic® is an engineered rat with a fixed light chain for development of bispecific, fully human antibodies. OmniChicken animals comprise the industry’s first human monoclonal antibody technology based on chickens. The OmniClic chicken is specifically developed to facilitate the generation of bispecific antibodies and retains the ability to generate diverse, high quality affinity matured antibodies. All five types of OmniAb therapeutic human antibody platform, OmniRat, OmniFlic, OmniMouse, OmniChicken® and OmniClic®, use patented technology, have broad freedom to operate, produce highly diversified, fully human antibody repertoires optimized in vivo for immunogenicity, manufacturability, and therapeutic efficacy, and deliver fully human antibodies with high affinity, specificity, expression, solubility and stability - Naturally Optimized Human Antibodies®.
About Ligand Pharmaceuticals
Ligand is a revenue-generating biopharmaceutical company focused on developing or acquiring technologies that help pharmaceutical companies discover and develop medicines. Our business model creates value for stockholders by providing a diversified portfolio of biotech and pharmaceutical product revenue streams that are supported by an efficient and low corporate cost structure. Our goal is to offer investors an opportunity to participate in the promise of the biotech industry in a profitable, diversified and lower-risk business than a typical biotech company. Our business model is based on doing what we do best: drug discovery, early-stage drug development, product reformulation and partnering. We partner with other pharmaceutical companies to leverage what they do best (late-stage development, regulatory management and commercialization) to ultimately generate our revenue. Ligand’s OmniAb® technology platform is a patent-protected transgenic animal platform used in the discovery of fully human mono- and bispecific therapeutic antibodies. The Captisol platform technology is a patent-protected, chemically modified cyclodextrin with a structure designed to optimize the solubility and stability of drugs. The Vernalis Design Platform (VDP) integrates protein structure determination and engineering, fragment screening and molecular modeling, with medicinal chemistry, to help enable success in novel drug discovery programs against highly-challenging targets. Ab Initio™ technology and services for the design and preparation of customized antigens enable the successful discovery of therapeutic antibodies against difficult-to-access cellular targets. Ligand has established multiple alliances, licenses and other business relationships with the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies including Amgen, Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi, Janssen, Takeda, Servier, Gilead Sciences and Baxter International. For more information, please visit www.ligand.com.
Follow Ligand on Twitter @Ligand_LGND.
About Berkeley Lights
Berkeley Lights is a leading Digital Cell Biology company focused on enabling and accelerating the rapid development and commercialization of biotherapeutics and other cell-based products for our customers. The Berkeley Lights Platform captures deep phenotypic, functional and genotypic information for thousands of single cells in parallel and can also deliver the live biology customers desire in the form of the best cells. Our platform is a fully integrated, end-to-end solution, comprising proprietary consumables, including our OptoSelect™ chips and reagent kits, advanced automation systems, and application software. We developed the Berkeley Lights Platform to provide the most advanced environment for rapid functional characterization of single cells at scale, the goal of which is to establish an industry standard for our customers throughout their cell-based product value chain.
Berkeley Lights’ Beacon and Lightning™ systems and Culture Station™ instrument are for research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.
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