Panspecific antibodies: Novimmune successful in designing antibodies with multiple specifies 

Plan-Les-Ouates/Geneve - NovImmune announced today the description, for the first time, of a single antibody engineered for double antigen binding specificity involving chemokines as targets. The work was accepted for publication in mAbs, the first international peer-reviewed journal of its kind to focus exclusively on monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). Antibodies are designed by nature to bind to epitopes on pathogens with high capacity through a unique one binding specificity mechanism. However, with current molecular biology know how, a team of scientists at NovImmune succeeded in rationally inventing an antibody with two specificities within the one antibody binding site paradigm. This novel and innovative antibody engineering approach will open future avenues for the design of panspecific therapeutic antibodies, that is, antibodies with a binding site that is rationally designed to have multiple intrinsic binding specificities. The experimental strategy, taken by the NovImmune team, could be potentially expanded to apply wherever there is a therapeutic rationale to simultaneously modulate the activity of two target proteins or epitopes. The benefit of hitting two birds with one stone is to create synergistic therapeutic effects with, for example, redundant biological pathways (chemokines) or two non-overlapping epitopes (aggregating tumor specific antigens).

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