OmniAb, Inc. held its first Research & Technology virtual event earlier, during which members of the management team reviewed the Company’s technology offerings and highlighted the launch of OmnidAb, the industry’s first and only transgenic chicken producing single domain antibodies (sdAbs). The archived webcast and speaker slides will be available on the Investors portion of OmniAb’s website.
“Since the completion of the transaction that created OmniAb as an independent public company almost exactly one year ago, we’ve made tremendous progress in building out our business and research teams and increasing the number of active partner programs. With the infrastructure in place to support our highly scalable business model, OmniAb is well positioned for significant growth with a differentiated platform as we facilitate the discovery and development of novel therapeutic antibodies by our partners,” said Matt Foehr, Chief Executive Officer of OmniAb.
“Our technologies are making important impacts on our partners’ R&D pipelines and are having positive impacts on patients’ lives. OmnidAb is an exciting new technology that is now being used by our partners. We look forward to additional new technologies and partner experience enhancements launching next year and beyond as our internal innovation engine is becoming more efficient,” he added.
Today’s virtual event featured presentations from senior management with business updates and an overview of various technology platforms, including the newly-launched OmnidAb platform.
“We continue to innovate around our technology offerings. The latest innovation is OmnidAb, a platform for single domain antibodies based upon a human VH scaffold that affinity matures in a chicken host environment to provide a functionally diverse immune repertoire unavailable from mammalian systems. OmnidAb is the first and only transgenic chicken producing sdAbs and creates the opportunity to significantly improve discovery approaches at a time when there is growing industry interest in the modality,” said Bill Harriman, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Antibody Discovery of OmniAb.
OmnidAb™ Technology Launch
Management provided an overview of the OmnidAb transgenic chicken novel host system that builds upon the success of its OmniChicken legacy. Highlights included:
- OmnidAb transgenic chickens express an optimized single-domain humanized framework, which can be utilized as modular building blocks, unlocking the versatility to “fit the biology” for a wide range of human disease, and are well suited to support a variety of therapeutic modalities.
- OmnidAb antibodies target distinct epitopes and have favorable developability profiles with high expression levels in mammalian cells.
- The current predominant process to discover therapeutic sdAbs requires large animal immunization and engineering – including humanization and optimization – adding time and increasing risks. Built-in use of an optimized human scaffold combined with efficient in vivo affinity maturation in OmnidAb minimizes the need for downstream engineering.
- Distinct from traditional antibodies, sdAbs produced by OmnidAb chickens have a compact format that opens significant new opportunities. Given their unique physical properties, they can be leveraged for alternate routes of administration, diagnostic applications and therapeutic approaches beyond what is typically possible with conventional antibodies.
SOURCE : BusinessWire