September 25, 2015
CBC Awards Help Move Promising Synthetic Antibody Technology into the Commercialization Pipeline
A 2009 CBC Spark Award to Anthony Kossiakoff (UChicago) and Vladimir Gelfand (NU) allowed the development of a high-throughput technology platform to efficiently produce customized, engineered, “synthetic antibodies.” Advances made with Spark funding allowed Kossiakoff and colleagues to win a $12 million center grant from the NIH, which was matched with a $2.3 million Lever Award from the CBC in 2012. In July 2015, the pharma company Celgene committed to a 3 year, $25 million partnership to use the technology to develop next-generation cancer drugs based on synthetic antibodies. CBC investigators can access customized affinity reagents via the Chicago Synthetic Antibody Pipeline (CSAP).
Image: Crystal Structures of Synthetic Antibody-Target Complexes. Synthetic antibodies (sAB, arrows) can interact with a variety of cellular targets, such as proteins (left) and RNA molecules (right). Image Credit: Shohei Koide and Anthony Kossiakoff.
Official Press Release: Antibody Network Partners With Celgene for Cancer Therapies, by Nicholas Weilers, September 15, 2015, UCSF News Center
see also:
▸ 2009 CBC Spark Award
▸ 2012 CBC Lever Award
▸ Chicago Synthetic Antibody Pipeline (CSAP)
▸ Recombinant Antibody Network (RAN)
▸ Celgene Corporation