Glycosylation of biopharmaceuticals has a pivotal role in safety and efficacy by modulating a wide range of drug properties, including immunogenicity, half-life, and effector functions.
Manipulating glycosylation patterns on antibodies produced in plants with our Glycaneering technology confers numerous benefits, including greatly improved homogeneity compared to CHO glycosylation and royalty-free technology for the production of afucosylated antibodies. When coupled with FastPharming, this gives iBio the capability to efficiently and cost-effectively produce antibodies with tightly controlled glycosylation patterns, including afucosylated therapeutic antibodies.
Glycosylation patterns on biologics tend to be uniform to help the body recognize them as “self” and not attack; however, when developing antibodies for immune-oncology applications, different glycosylation patterns allow the immune system to tag targets for destruction more effectively and increase antibody-dependent cellular toxicity (ADCC). Using Glycaneering, we can use plants to change antibody characteristics so that the warheads—where the molecule binds to the targets – are like a human antibody but are modified on the region that attracts the other immune cells to kill its target, making our antibodies particularly potent compared to those that are not modified as such.
With our Glycaneering platform, we simply grow plants that add or remove specific sugars, creating molecules with characteristics that improve the recognition of tumor cells and thereby enhance immune responses through increased ADCC.
