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.