We can’t wait to check out these talks at PEGS Boston 2021!

Another year has rolled by and we find ourselves at PEGS Boston again! Rapid Novor will be participating this year as well, with a talk entitled “Landing on the Moon with Mass Spectrometry: Polyclonal Sequencing with Only Proteomics.”

Our very own Director of International Business Development, Anthony Stajduhar, will be discussing a really cool breakthrough our team made recently: sequencing a pool of antibodies without the use of nucleotide sequencing. We are very proud of being the first in the world to de novo sequence a protein sample rich in antibodies from rabbit blood using our antibody discovery platform REpAb®.

We can’t wait to share our results with the scientific community at PEGS Boston. But that’s not the only thing we’re excited about! PEGS Boston has an amazing lineup of speakers that we are eager to hear from; in this article, Maria and Yuning highlight some of the talks they and the Rapid Novor team are looking forward to the most and muse about future applications of our technology. We hope you check ours and their talks, which are at the forefront of discovery. 

Therapeutic Antibodies Development

Olga Ab – Targeting Folate Receptor Alpha (FRα) with IMGN151, a Next-Generation Antibody-Drug Conjugate (ADC)

With a last name perfectly suited for immunology research, Dr. Ab will present preclinical data for two novel ADCs in the fight against ovarian cancer. We’re excited to hear more about developments on ADCs by the team of ImmunoGen Inc.. Thanks to our REmAb® sequencing platform, companies have successfully engineered potent ADCs by confirming the antibody protein sequence to design scaffolds customized to disease targets of interest. REmAb® is also an excellent tool to validate ADCs and other antibodies for use prior to pre-clinical and clinical applications. From this talk, we’re hoping to gain new knowledge of ADC development and find out if REmAb® can offer more benefits to the field.

Gary J. Nabel – Tackling AIDS and Cancer with trispecific antibodies

As a former virologist, Maria is perhaps most excited to see Dr. Nabel’s talk. CEO and co-founder of ModeX Therapeutics, and prior CSO of Sanofi, Dr. Nabel will discuss the use of trispecific antibodies against HIV, and their potential against cancer. The team at Rapid Novor is invested in learning more about multispecific antibodies. Recently, our team unveiled an antibody discovery platform using our REpAb® sequencing technology to examine polyclonal pools of antibodies. We are hopeful our platform will help to engineer future multivalent antibodies based on discovered high-affinity antibodies so we can tackle difficult-to-treat diseases in the future.

Immune System Characterization

Having worked with adeno-associated virus vector (AAV) in the past, Maria also did a double take when she saw the talk by Michael G. Tovey. Dr. Tovey will present for Svar Life Science on quantifying the immune response to AAV vectors with different capsid specificities. AAV is still the vector of choice for gene therapy but bypassing the immune system to ensure efficacious delivery remains a hurdle. Understanding the immune response to these therapies is therefore of great importance. Our NovorIg(™) platform aims to decode the immune system by mining responses against diseases to better track vaccination efficacy, understand autoimmune diseases, monitor cancers, and even perhaps one day screen for the best AAV therapy based on immune responses.

Computational Protein Design

David Baker – University of Washington, The Coming of Age of de Novo Protein Design

Yuning is eager to hear Dr. Baker’s talk. A giant in computational protein design, Dr. Baker will discuss the next-generation design of proteins through manipulation of their biophysical properties. Though not entirely focused on antibodies, we are interested in understanding more about what structural biologists look for when designing proteins de novo since it can also be applied to antibodies. The Baker group recently de novo designed modular protein biosensors against the constant domain of IgG1.

Structural knowledge of natural proteins is incredibly important for de novo protein design. Within the past few years, we’ve seen an emerging application of our protein de novo sequencing technology in helping structural biologists to determine the structures of naturally isolated antibodies and to examine antigen-antibody interactions at the atomic level. We believe protein sequence data generated through REpAb and NovorIg will keep contributing to structural knowledge in greater diversity to guide a better de novo protein design.

See you at PEGS Boston Virtual Conference 2021

In conclusion, we’re looking forward to the event, to learning the latest developments in our industry and to sharing our advancements. Please come and see us:

• Rapid Novor Virtual Booth – Meet Jenn and Yang and learn all about what we do and how we could help.
• Our talk entitled: “Landing on the Moon with Mass Spectrometry: Polyclonal Sequencing with Only Proteomics.” on Wednesday, May 12th, 2021, at 9:40 am EST. Click here to add it to your conference agenda.