Evotec strives to provide partners and customers with less expensive, faster, and more flexible approaches for discovering, developing and manufacturing biotherapeutics.
With the acquisition of Just Biotherapeutics in 2019, Evotec made a major push into biologics, and has successfully built a fully-integrated platform to drive monoclonal antibody (“mAb”) programmes from concept through to commercialisation. The company generates antibody lead candidates by providing access to in vivo and in vitro sources of antibodies, combined with state-of-the-art technologies to ensure success for a broad range of targets and disease states. In addition, if needed, selected lead candidates can be further optimised using powerful computational platforms such as Evotec’s proprietary Abacus™ in silico tool suite to enhance the productivity, but also ease of manufacturing and formulation stability.
For in vivo immunisation, Evotec is offering the ATX-GxTM mouse platform developed by its collaboration partner Alloy Therapeutics. This platform is a suite of immunocompetent transgenic mice for best-in-class in vivo discovery of fully human monoclonal antibodies. These mice are engineered to drive the greatest potential diversity and broadest epitopic coverage of unique human antibodies binding to a specific target of interest.
ATX-GxTM mice provide:
- a fully human heavy chain repertoire,
- human kappa and human lambda chain repertoire,
- haplotype diversity, and
- limited immunodominance.
Taken together, these immunocompetent transgenic mice represent the complete functional human antibody repertoire, and their fully functional, robust immune response is equivalent to the response of wild type mice. They are also available on multiple genetic backgrounds such as BALB/c or BL/6.
ATX-GxTM has been extensively validated and continuously expanded for more than 12 years and is currently used by over 75 antibody discovery groups in large biopharma and small-to-midsize biotech companies as well as academic research labs.
Following immunisation, Evotec is combining traditional hybridoma technology with automated devices for high throughput clone selection, screening, recombinant expression and purification to shorten and simplify the process of hybridoma establishment. Screening is performed with high-throughput technologies, such as the iQue® Advanced Flow Cytometry Platform. Next-generation sequencing is used to obtain VH/VL information, followed by an in silico analysis using Just – Evotec Biologics Abacus® software tool. Once VH/VL information is available, several hundred mAbs can be produced in parallel in small scale. This high quality material can then be used for further downstream characterisation, such as functional activities that allow the selection of potential lead candidates.
This streamlined workflow to generate high-quality antibody panels for functional assessment adds to Evotec’s comprehensive suite of large molecule discovery tools, disease biology, state-of-the-art cell line development, machine learning design tools, manufacturing, preclinical IND-enabling studies, as well as FIH clinical support, and commercialisation.
Evotec’s AI-driven antibody discovery can be accessed as stand-alone services or through Evotec’s seamlessly integrated antibody drug discovery platform