Therapeutic Antibodies: The Next Generation
Pharma’s Cutting Edge
Vol. 3 Number 9 - September 2005
Therapeutic Antibodies: The Next Generation
I enjoyed writing the new technology overview of molecular evolution in July’s edition of Pharma’s Cutting Edge (currently still up on the homepage), so I decided that this month I would write another new technology overview, this time about antibodies. If you appreciate these types of articles, or would prefer I stick to editorials of a more controversial nature, please let me know.
It’s my guess that just about everyone who reads this will already be familiar with the basics of therapeutic antibodies–what they are, how they are made specific to their target and how they are being used to great clinical advantage. So, I’m going to forgo that entire discussion. If you are hungry for more general information on therapeutic antibodies, I refer you to a review on the topic published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery in 2003.
So what’s fairly new and what’s hot in the therapeutic antibody field? How about bispecific antibodies, intrabodies, mimetibodies, multipurpose antibodies, nanobodies and peptide-antibody conjugates? Definitions for and firms researching and engineering these novel antibodies are shown in the attached tables. Where will we see the first clinical use of these exciting new technologies? My educated guess thinks it will be in cancer therapy first, probably hematological malignancy.
Next Gen Antibodies
September 29th, 2005 at 6:39 pm
We’ve been applying some of these products as we can get them, and there is some amazing stuff in the early pipe. But I’m wondering when they are going to run out of snappy marketeer names. We had a discussion about this at our weekly brainstorming/fantasy meeting. What we want is a simple category scheme. I’m proposing that anyone coming up with yet another fancy chain of amino acids tells us: Weight, number of intended action sites, selectivity of each active site, variability of each active site, relationship of intended action sites, non-intended actions, etc.
Pragmatically, whatever names these things get, we’re just about at the point where this stuff is engineering instead of science — with sufficient cleverness you can almost program cellular function right now.