GigaGen Announces Publication in the Peer-Reviewed Journal mAbsArticle Details GigaGen’s Affinity Maturation Approach for the Optimization of Monoclonal Antibody Drug Candidates Discovered via its Surge Platform

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Oct. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GigaGen Inc., a biotechnology company advancing transformative antibody drugs for infectious diseases, transplant rejection and checkpoint resistant cancers, announced today publication of a peer-reviewed article titled, “Affinity maturation of antibodies by combinatorial codon mutagenesis versus error-prone PCR,” in the peer-reviewed journal mAbs. The publication is available online here.

GigaGen’s newly published data details the technical foundation of its approach for the affinity maturation of monoclonal antibodies discovered via its leading single-cell microfluidic technology platform, Surge. Affinity maturation is commonly used for antibody optimization when developing new drugs. The company is leveraging this technology platform for the development of monoclonal antibodies with unique binding and affinity profiles against selected oncology targets.

David Johnson, Ph.D., MBA, co-founder and chief executive officer of GigaGen, commented, “Often, antibodies need to be further engineered through ‘affinity maturation’ to achieve the appropriate affinities and kinetics that translate into in vivo efficacy. While this process can be important for antibody drug development, there are no universally accepted protocols for efficient and high-performance antibody affinity maturation. Our study is one of the most thorough evaluations of affinity maturation methods ever published. We have used knowledge from our work to develop novel antibody therapeutics with unique profiles against selected oncology targets, such as CTLA-4, with the potential to result in enhanced efficacy and safety profiles versus current antibody drug alternatives.”

Study highlights

• GigaGen’s antibody affinity maturation approach includes a novel mutagenesis strategy, which enables combinatorial mutagenesis of individual amino acids in handpicked regions of a target gene, which can be leveraged to generate proteins with enhanced functionalities.
• Critical to the workflow is the incorporation of long-read-next generation sequencing, which allows GigaGen to readily analyze the DNA sequence across thousands of mutants, creating mutational maps and comparisons not readily done using traditional sequencing approaches.
• GigaGen’s approach also enables functional examination of library-derived scFv antibodies and their corresponding full-length antibodies.

About Surge
GigaGen’s single-cell technology platform, Surge, is a unique combination of single-cell emulsion droplet microfluidics technology, genomics and protein library engineering, which significantly increases the productivity and speed of antibody drug discovery. Surge captures and recreates complete antibody repertoires as recombinant antibody libraries, encompassing nearly 100% of the diversity within natural antibody libraries. Additionally, it enables massively parallel screening of millions of antibody libraries while uniquely maintaining the native pairing of the antibody light and heavy chains, crucial for the development of antibodies with optimal function and high sensitivity and specificity. Surge replaces conventional drug discovery technologies such as hybridomas and phage display, enabling discovery of a wide spectrum of drug candidates, including rare antibodies with potentially unique profiles.

About GigaGen
GigaGen is advancing transformative antibody drugs for infectious diseases, transplant rejection and checkpoint resistant cancers by leveraging industry-leading, single-cell technologies. Our technology uniquely captures and recreates complete immune repertoires as functional antibody libraries. This approach has enabled the creation of the first recombinant polyclonal immunoglobulin therapies, which overcome current limitations of plasma-based products. GigaGen’s technology has also filled a pipeline of monoclonal antibodies with unique properties against known and novel oncology targets with the potential to translate into therapies with improved efficacy and safety profiles.

Media Contact
Monica Rouco Molina, Ph.D.
LifeSci Communications
+1-929-469-3850
mroucomolina@lifescicomms.com