Abalone Bio

Our technology directly measures activity of all antibodies, eliminating biases from binding-based methods. Existing large-scale discovery technologies focus on attributes like binding affinity first, largely because that is historically an easy property to score and optimize. Activity is tested very late in the discovery process on a few high-affinity antibodies targeting regions that may have nothing to do with altering the activity of the target. It’s like tightly grabbing a pair of scissors by the blades instead of more loosely by the handle - a high affinity but non -functional interaction.

Antibodies are transforming drug development, especially when it comes to tackling challenging targets like GPCRs (G-protein-coupled receptors). GPCRs are among the hardest target classes for antibodies because they require precise adjustments to their protein structures to activate them. Unlike other targets that can be triggered through straightforward dimerization or clustering, GPCRs demand a unique level of precision - making antibody therapy both complex and groundbreaking. Here at Abalone Bio we have developed our Functional Antibody Selection Technology (FAST) platform to rapidly create difficult-to-discover antibody activators to specifically and effectively drug challenging and promising target classes??? Stay tuned for more updates!

Thank you California Life Sciences (CLS) for shining a spotlight on the work we are doing! "The technical core of our company is our platform, also named FAST (Functional Antibody Selection Technology), which not only discovers rare activating antibodies but also generates data that we can uniquely leverage with AI tools to learn how to create them. This isn’t just an idea- we’ve experimentally validated antibody activators for some of the most challenging targets for ourselves and our partners." - Richard Yu

We're back from #PEGSEurope where discussions centered on the transformative role of machine learning in antibody drug discovery. We had the chance to hear from: Rebecca Croasdale-Wood, PhD, Senior Director, Augmented Biologics Discovery & Design, Biologics Engineering, Oncology, AstraZeneca Andrew Bradbury, MD, PhD, CSO, Specifica, an IQVIA business Charlotte Deane, PhD, Professor, Structural Bioinformatics, Statistics, University of Oxford; Executive Chair, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Andreas Evers, PhD, Associate Scientific Director, Antibody Discovery & Protein Engineering, Global Research & Development Discovery Technology, Merck Healthcare KGaA The panelists emphasized the importance of training ML models on high-quality, targeted datasets to improve predictions for antibody optimization, including binding affinity and developability. In addition to our VP of Antibody Discover, Monica Schwartz presenting our poster, we attended insightful discussions on the latest in de novo design, where computational methods are driving antibody discovery forward. Key themes included integrating in silico methods throughout the discovery pipeline, the importance of both positive and negative data to refine models, and the challenge of advancing from binding predictions to functional outcomes, and more. It was an informative and inspiring week! Special thanks to Twist Bioscience for organizing a wonderful happy hour with scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science, bringing together innovative minds in the field!?Thank you everyone for a memorable week at PEGS!

Abalone is preparing for takeoff! Our Head of Antibody Discovery, Dr. Monica Schwartz, is heading to Barcelona for?PEGS Europe 2024 (https://lnkd.in/gNDSwp66). This year, the conference has expanded coverage of AI/ML, and Abalone's FAST technology is at the cutting edge of AI-driven antibody discovery and design for GPCRs. The FAST platform takes a synthetic biology approach that enables generation of large-scale high-quality activity data, which is the key to power our predictive engines. Monica will be sharing some exciting new data in her poster presentation. Come by and say hi! Functional Antibody Selection Technology (FAST) directly measures the functional activity of 100 million antibodies simultaneously, enabling the discovery of agonist antibodies. We produce library-scale sequence-function datasets that uniquely power generative protein language models to create novel active antibody sequences. Using FAST, Abalone has discovered agonist antibodies against multiple GPCR targets.

We have successfully integrated AI into our FAST platform, using powerful protein large language models to discover and design activating #antibodies for #GPCR targets. In our journey, Coiled has served as an indispensable partner enabling us to seamlessly scale from ideation to production. Check out this post by the Coiled team on how they have supported us: https://lnkd.in/gKxd7KNj

Jingjing Liu, Sr. Scientist at Abalone Bio, will present a poster at #SIMB2024 highlighting our continued progress towards developing therapeutic antibody agonists. This work features the amazing efforts by the whole Abalone Bio team in developing FAST, our powerful platform for discovering rare agonist #antibodies for #GPCRs and aiming it at challenging targets. Learn more by commenting on this post or emailing?[email protected]. See you there!

Let us help you discover and generate activating and modulating #antibodies for your challenging GPCR targets. Meet with Abalone Bio's CEO Richard Yu at #BIO2024! Connect with us in the BIO One-on-One Partnering system.

Really excited to announce that Sameer Soi has joined us as VP of Data Science and AI! We're awash in functional antibody datasets, and he's architecting the data side of things- collection, analysis, and integration with data collection- to accelerate our transition from GPCR antibody agonist discovery to the design of optimized molecules. Grateful to have you on the team, Sameer!

Really excited to announce that Sameer Soi has joined us as VP of Data Science and AI! We're awash in functional antibody datasets, and he's architecting the data side of things- collection, analysis, and integration with data collection- to accelerate our transition from GPCR antibody agonist discovery to the design of optimized molecules. Grateful to have you on the team, Sameer!