Technology

Rabbit Antibodies - A New Source of Therapeutics, A New Standard of Care:

Apexigen's rabbit antibody technology may hold the key to overcoming the limitations of other antibody technologies. For decades, scientists have made ground-breaking discoveries with rabbit antibodies in research settings, being drawn to them by their unmatched diversity of unique high quality antibodies – with high affinity, high specificity and the ability to recognize unique epitopes. Importantly, this diversity provides critical advantages for the discovery of therapeutic antibodies:

1. Due to their diversity, rabbit antibodies are able to recognize a more complete repertoire of epitopes on a disease target, an essential capability in the area of disease target validation. As many of the currently clinically validated disease targets are already being addressed by drug developers, the next generation of blockbusters will need to be focused on targets yet to be discovered. These advantages related to target validation should ensure that rabbit antibodies play a key role in this next generation of blockbuster antibody products.


2. Diverse rabbit antibody sequences provide broadly expanded capabilities for discovering specific antibodies that are capable of accessing difficult disease targets. Current mouse and human antibody technologies have limited ability to address these intractable disease targets.


3. The ability for rabbit monoclonal antibodies to be recognized across different species (e.g. mice, humans) can eliminate the need for surrogate antibodies in preclinical testing. This provides significant time and cost savings during the drug development process.

The rabbit immune system is able to create a greater diversity (than either the mouse or man) of unique antibodies to a target because it primarily uses a mechanism called gene conversion, which is not used by man or rodent species, to create antibody diversity. Gene conversion allows the rabbit immune system to create “unlimited” diversity of its antibody repertoire.

Today, Apexigen is pioneering a movement into antibody therapeutics based on rabbit-derived humanized monoclonal antibodies as a means of providing therapeutic benefits that have not been achieved through the use of other technologies.

Novel Humanization Technology: the MLG Technology

The company’s proprietary Mutation Lineage Guided (MLG) humanization technology is a novel approach that represents a significant departure from standard mouse antibody humanization processes. MLG utilizes the large amount of information derived from the diversity of antibody sequences generated by the rabbit, to humanize the entire antibody and achieve a very high degree of humanization. Residues in both the framework and the CDRs (Complementarity Determining Regions) can be humanized through this method. The results are antibodies that retain full activity, offering key benefits compared to other humanization technologies that tend to produce antibodies with reduced affinity and potency.