AbCellera and Harbour Antibodies Announce Technology Co-Offering Agreement for Next-Generation Fully-Human Antibody Discovery

Co-offering combines AbCellera’s microfluidic single-cell screening platform with Harbour’s H2L2 transgenic mouse technology to create an end-to-end solution for the discovery of fully-human lead therapeutic antibodies.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia & ROTTERDAM, Netherlands & CAMBRIDGE, Mass

AbCellera and Harbour Antibodies, a Harbour BioMed subsidiary, announced today that they have entered into an agreement to combine AbCellera’s single-cell antibody discovery capabilities with Harbour’s H2L2 transgenic mouse platform, establishing an industry-leading discovery solution that enables the generation of large panels of fully-human therapeutic antibodies with unmatched speed, quality and efficiency. The combined offering eliminates the need for antibody humanization, and benefits from AbCellera’s full suite of antibody discovery capabilities, spanning antigen design and immunization through to discovery, characterization, and lead selection.

“AbCellera’s platform unlocks the power of humanized rodents. It enables rapid and stringent screening of human antibody repertoires at more than 100-fold greater depth than hybridoma. This allows us to rapidly produce hundreds of high-quality human antibody leads that have benefited from natural selection and maturation in vivo, maximizing the chance of good developability and low immunogenicity,” commented Carl Hansen, CEO & President of AbCellera. “This agreement aligns with our strategy of working with others to create value and reinforces our commitment to enabling partners with flexible solutions that integrate industry-leading innovation.”

“H2L2 Mice have been widely used by over thirty companies and academic centers for discovering high-quality therapeutic antibodies with superior affinity and development properties,” said Dr. Jingsong Wang, CEO of Harbour Biomed. “Two antibody drug candidates have entered into clinical stage development in the past twelve months, both derived from our H2L2 transgenic platform. We are pleased to partner with AbCellera, a company with industry-leading proprietary technologies to accelerate the antibody discovery process for pharma and biotech companies.”
The power of combining both platforms has been demonstrated in studies that have identified thousands of antigen-specific antibodies, from which hundreds of unique human antibodies were selected for desirable characteristics (e.g. affinity, specificity, ligand blocking) using stringent single-cell screening assays.

The H2L2 transgenic mice express carefully selected human immunoglobulin genes most suitable for therapeutic use, yielding robust and diverse human antibodies against therapeutic targets. AbCellera’s technology enables ultra-deep screening of the H2L2 immune repertoire to discover fully human antibodies from millions of single antibody-secreting cells per run, including plasma cells and memory B cells. AbCellera’s platform supports a wide array of single-cell antibody selection assays, combining multi-step and multiplexed binding measurements and live-cell assays. The combination of speed, screening depth, and greater specificity translates to successful discovery against any target class, including difficult targets such as membrane proteins, GPCRs, and ion channels.

Beyond its core microfluidic screening technology, AbCellera integrates expertise in animal immunizations for any species, assay design, bioinformatic analysis using a proprietary suite of software and visualization tools, and antibody characterization for developability and engineering. The platform has been validated in multiple partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, proving successful when other technologies, including hybridoma, display technologies and emerging B cell selection platforms, have fallen short.

About AbCellera Biologics Inc.
AbCellera is a privately held company that engages in partnerships to discover and develop next-generation therapeutic antibodies. AbCellera’s single-cell platform integrates end-to-end capabilities for therapeutic antibody discovery through a combination of technologies including proprietary immunizations, microfluidics, high-throughput imaging, genomics, computation, and laboratory automation. Ultra-deep screening of single B cells allows unprecedented access to natural immune responses, enabling rapid isolation of large and diverse panels of high-quality lead antibodies from any species, including humans.

About Harbour Antibodies
Harbour Antibodies is a fully owned subsidiary of Harbour BioMed, a global biopharmaceutical company discovering and developing innovative therapeutics for oncology and immunological diseases (www.harbourbiomed.com). Harbour Antibodies owns two strains of transgenic mice for generating human therapeutic antibodies: (1) mice that generate antibodies comprised of two heavy chains and two light chains (H2L2) with fully human variable regions; and (2) mice that generate novel “heavy chain only” antibodies (HCAb). The HCAb mice enable the development of antibody fragment-based therapeutics such as nanobodies, bi-specific antibodies and CAR-T with favorable drug-like properties. For additional information, please visit harbourantibodies.com

Contacts
AbCellera Biologics Inc.
Kevin Heyries, PhD, 604-559-9005
media@abcellera.com
www.abcellera.com
or
Harbour Antibodies
Timothy Miller
timothy.miller@harbourbiomed.com
www.harbourbiomed.com