March 10, 2015. AxioMx announced today that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the company a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant (1R43GM112385-01). This Phase I award, which will be administered by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), will fund the development of multiplex antigen screening technology allowing the discovery of antibodies against thousands of protein/peptide targets in a single experiment.
Traditional phage display methods, such as that currently employed by AxioMx, involve screening a library of M13 phage displaying >1010 different antibodies to identify binders to a single protein or peptide antigen. The multiplex antigen screening technology to be developed under this grant will allow the same phage library to be simultaneously screened against a library of >104 different antigens displayed on the cell surface of E. coli. Next-generation DNA sequencing will be used to identify antibody-antigen pairs.
“Researchers could capitalize on the power of this technology in a number of intriguing ways from generating antibodies against the entire proteome of an emerging pathogenic organism to screening sets of overlapping peptides encompassing one or several large proteins,” Michael Weiner, chief scientific officer and founder of AxioMx, said.
Margaret Kiss, director of molecular sciences at AxioMx, added that this technology is especially exciting because it will magnify the scale of antibody discovery to a level that would have seemed like a fantasy only a few years ago. The techniques currently employed by AxioMx have already cut antibody development times in half while producing a more reliable, consistent product. The introduction of multiplex antigen screening will usher in an era of massively parallel antibody discovery comparable to the explosion in genome sequencing that occurred at the beginning of this century.
“This work will help close a massive gap between the genomics and proteomics fields,” Weiner said. “The past few decades have seen exponential increases in the speed and cost-effectiveness of DNA-based research, while proteomics technologies, such as recombinant antibody development, have seen limited advances. It’s time to close the gap: The databases full of sequenced genomes will soon be joined by libraries of sequenced antibodies against the proteomes of entire organisms.”
About AxioMx Inc.
AxioMx, founded in 2012 and based in Branford, Connecticut, is a leader in recombinant antibody technologies. Its founders, Chris McLeod and Dr. Michael Weiner, are life science entrepreneurs who have previously led successful genomics, next-generation sequencing, microfluidics, bioinformatics, and proteomics organizations.
AxioMx’s unique platform of proprietary phage display libraries, Rapid Liquid Screening, and affinity maturation methods enables the fast delivery of recombinant antibodies with high specificity, affinity, and reproducibility that are optimized to perform a desired application. The company offers a full range of custom antibody discovery and development services for the research, diagnostic, and therapeutic marketplaces, including the new AxioMx Express custom antibody service which provides 5 week development of research use recombinant antibodies. For more information about AxioMx, please visit www.axiomxinc.com.
AxioMx Receives SBIR Grant for Multiplex Antigen Screening_March 10 2015
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