Non-human primate models are poor predictors of human immunogenicity. The industry has shifted to human-relevant ex vivo assays using whole blood or PBMCs. These tests can assess risks like complement activation upfront, enabling proactive protein engineering to improve a drug's safety profile.
To overcome on-target, off-tumor toxicity, LabGenius designs antibodies that act like biological computers. These molecules "sample" the density of target receptors on a cell's surface and are engineered to activate and kill only when a specific threshold is met, distinguishing high-expression cancer cells from low-expression healthy cells.
By first targeting T-cell lymphoma, Corvus gathers crucial safety and biologic effect data in humans. This knowledge about the drug's impact on T-cells directly informs and de-risks subsequent trials in autoimmune diseases like atopic dermatitis, creating a capital-efficient development path.
By continuously measuring a drug's effect on the body (pharmacodynamics), the wearable device provides a real-time view of a patient's phenotype. This granular data can revolutionize clinical trial design, safety monitoring, and drug dosing, moving beyond static genomic data to understand real-world drug response.
Using safety and preliminary efficacy data from its lead drug for MPS1, Immusoft successfully requested an FDA waiver for definitive toxicology studies for its next program in MPS2. This platform approach saves significant time and capital, accelerating the entire pipeline without 'reinventing the wheel'.
Modern, highly sensitive assays often detect high rates of anti-drug antibodies (ADAs). However, the critical question for drug developers isn't the ADA incidence rate itself, but whether that immune response actually impacts drug exposure, efficacy, or overall patient outcome.
Unlike many cell therapies, Rion's platelet-derived exosomes are devoid of the self/non-self surface markers that trigger immune rejection. This "immune privilege" is a critical biological advantage, allowing the product to be used as a universal, off-the-shelf therapy for any patient without needing donor matching.
The FDA is shifting policy to no longer allow reliance on immunogenicity data (immunobridging) for approving new or updated vaccines. This move toward requiring full clinical efficacy trials will make it harder to combat evolving pathogens and would have prevented past approvals of key vaccines like those for HPV and Ebola.
The bottleneck for AI in drug development isn't the sophistication of the models but the absence of large-scale, high-quality biological data sets. Without comprehensive data on how drugs interact within complex human systems, even the best AI models cannot make accurate predictions.
Step Pharma's confidence in their drug's clean safety profile originated from studying a human population with a natural mutation in the CTPS1 gene. This real-world genetic data de-risked their therapeutic approach from the outset, guiding development towards a highly selective and safe inhibitor.
Bi-specific T-cell engagers (BiTEs) are highly immunogenic because the mechanism activating T-cells to kill cancer also primes them to mount an immune response against the drug itself. This 'collateral effect' is an inherent design challenge for this drug class.