Seattle, Washington – January 14, 2013 – sAber™ Bioscience Corporation announced today that it has
licensed the use of the XmAb® Fv technology platform from Xencor, Inc. for the optimization of antibody
drug candidates. Under the agreement, sAber will gain access to the technology for the optimization of
antibodies derived from non-murine sources. This technology will allow sAber to rapidly build an
internal pipeline of fully human therapeutic antibodies as well as to provide contract discovery services
to customers in the Biotech and Pharma industry. Said Xencor CEO Bassil Dahiyat, “I’m enthusiastic
about sAber’s plans and their ability to push this technology into new areas of antibody discovery and
optimization”.
A Proven Technology for Generating Fully Human Antibodies
Humanization is the protein engineering process used to make antibodies isolated from immunized non-
human hosts compatible with the human immune system. XmAb variable region optimization uses a
novel and proprietary method for humanizing antibodies called “human re-stringing” and is one of the
only engineering methods proven capable of generating “fully human” antibodies. This computation-
based method scans the entire naturally-occurring repertoire of human antibody sequences to find the
components that best match the structure of the starting antibody. The robust computational algorithm
eliminates laborious modeling steps from the humanization process and enables the parallel engineering
of many antibodies. The XmAb approach provides simultaneous optimization of affinity and physical
properties while facilitating the creation of fully human antibodies indistinguishable from those derived
from display techniques or transgenic mice. Xencor’s entire XmAb pipeline has been created using this
tool, including clinically tested antibodies XmAb®2513, XmAb®5574, and XmAb®5871.
Antibodies from the native immune repertoire of an immunized host have the inherent advantage of
innate optimization mechanisms including somatic mutagenesis for high affinity and negative selection
for high specificity. Because each species has its own unique antigen processing machinery and
accompanying antibody repertoire, each will generate antibodies with correspondingly unique antigen
recognition. The use of an immunized host simplifies the generation of antibodies to both complex and
difficult-to-express antigens. Additionally, the use of nonmurine species bypasses the confounding issue
of murine host tolerance, thereby maximizing the potential for finding antibodies that both bind human
targets and are testable in murine disease models.
About sAber Bioscience Corporation
sAber Bioscience is developing its AnthropImmune™ antibody discovery platform to extend the range of
immunized hosts from which fully human antibodies are derived. sAber is tapping into an extensive new
source of antibody diversity for therapeutics discovery. Nonmurine host species, commonly rabbit and
goat, are widely used to make outstanding antibodies for research applications. However, inherent
limitations have thus far restricted their use for therapeutic antibody discovery. sAber is pairing two
rapid and robust methodologies to bypass these limitations and efficiently create novel antibodies for
therapeutic indications. sAber uses its proprietary Ig-Access™ technology to query the B-cell repertoire
of immunized hosts without the need for cumbersome hybridoma formation. sAber then applies its In Silico Transgenics™ method (incorporating the XmAb Fv technology licensed from Xencor) to generate
fully human antibodies. sAber Bioscience founder and CEO Phil Hammond, PhD, was formerly Associate
Director of Protein Engineering at Xencor and has over 25 years of experience in Biotechnology. This
experience includes key roles in the progression of several biotherapeutics from the lab to the clinic. For
more information please visit www.saberbio.com.
sAber Bioscience Contact:
Phil Hammond, Ph.D.
President and CEO
sAber Bioscience
Tel: 425-405-5016
phil@saberbio.com