Distributed Bio and Boehringer Ingelheim Announce SuperHuman Platform Transfer

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Distributed Bio, a global leader in computational optimization of fully human monoclonal antibody libraries, is pleased to announce an agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim to license the Distributed Bio SuperHuman Platform for accelerating biotherapeutics discovery across therapeutic areas.

“The SuperHuman Platform represents the culmination of a decade of our research in computational library design,” says Jacob Glanville, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Distributed Bio. “From analyzing thousands of human immune systems with our machine learning AbGenesis platform, we have harvested from nature the rules of making exceptional therapeutic repertoires. The result is a library of 76 billion antibodies that contains over 5,000 hits against any antigen, including hundreds of picomolar binders, all thermostable, non-immunogenic, pre-screened by human blood and therapeutically developed in advance to avoid engineering delays downstream. This is an order of magnitude more molecules than can be generated by other technologies, and will enable our partners at Boehringer Ingelheim to search for ultra-high affinity, species-cross reactive and exquisitely specific therapeutic antibodies at unprecedented speeds.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Distributed Bio will transfer and license its proprietary SuperHuman 2.0 antibody discovery platform to Boehringer Ingelheim. Boehringer Ingelheim has also secured access to continued improvements to the SuperHuman Platform. Distributed Bio will receive an undisclosed annual licensing fee and future payments upon achievement of specified preclinical and clinical milestones.

About Distributed Bio

Distributed Bio is a computational immunoengineering biotechnology group, self-funded by licensing a stack of technologies to partners across the pharmaceutical industry. Our mission is to disrupt biologic engineering with big data, machine learning, and computational immunology-driven design.

From a team that includes inventors of antibody repertoire sequencing technologies, their AbGenesis antibody and TCR repertoire analysis and engineering platform enables partners to analyze antibody repertoires by high-throughput sequence, sanger sequence, and functional assay without requiring large datacenter investments or local bioinformatics specialists. By using AbGenesis to analyze thousands of antibody repertoires and antibody libraries, they developed the computationally optimized SuperHuman antibody discovery platform. SuperHuman overcomes many of the limitation of other monoclonal generation technologies with an unprecedented diversity and developable fitness that has resulted in a unique engineering opportunity: a library that generates over 5000 unique hits against every antigen tested, including hundreds of unique picomolar binders against such challenging targets as PD1 and GHR. Given the number of hits, this library can be panned under unprecedented aggressive conditions, recovering hundreds of subnanomolar binders in under a week, recovering saturating coverage of hits against every epitope, and isolating multi-species cross-reactive members against target homologs without additional engineering.

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