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Drug Discovery

iBio's Discovery Engine

Epitope-Steered Antibody Discovery for Precision Immunotherapies

Antibody discovery is challenging. Only 5 of every 5000 concepts make it into the clinic.1 Many antibody failures can be attributed to a lack of specificity for disease-causing cells versus healthy cells and a lack of efficacy – both potentially due to binding the wrong epitope.

iBio’s patented Discovery Engine2 aims to increase the likelihood of success. Using artificial intelligence (AI) to drive epitope-steered antibody discovery, our Discovery Engine efficiently and consistently delivers antibody candidates against difficult targets​.

It does this by engineering mini-proteins embodying the structure of conformational epitopes, including subdominant epitopes, to discover traditionally challenging therapeutic antibodies. An epitope is the region of a target protein to which antibodies bind. The range of potential epitopes or binding sites on a target is enormous. But not all epitopes are created equally.

Traditional drug discovery has allowed the immune system to drive epitope selection and thus biasing antibody selection towards immunodominant epitopes. Often, the most efficacious epitope is not the immunodominant epitope, and therefore the best therapeutic antibodies are missed without epitope steering.

Image of engineered epitope pulling an antibody from a group of antibodies

A Powerful Tech Stack for Validating Difficult Targets

iBio’s Discovery Engine combines our patented Epitope Engineering Engine, a proprietary human Antibody Library, and our StableHuAntibody Optimizer to increase the likelihood of success for antibody discovery against difficult targets.

Overview of iBio’s Discovery Engine

iBio’s Antibody Discovery Platform In Action

Epitope-Steered Antibodies for Precision Immunotherapies

  1. Devol, Ross & Bedroussian, Armen & Yeo, Benjamin. (2022). The Global Biomedical Industry: Preserving U.S. Leadership.
  2. U.S. Patent No. 11,545,238 (issued January 3, 2023)
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