Announced today, the partnership will grants Charles River’s clients access to Distributed Bio’s antibody libraries and integrated antibody optimization technologies.
The combination of Distributed Bio’s antibody libraries and Charles River’s drug development capabilities will create an end-to-end platform for therapeutic antibody discovery and development, According to the companies.
“The speed of discovery with the Distributed Bio platform has the potential to disrupt the human therapeutic antibody space,” said Julie Frearson, PhD, Charles River corporate vice president, global business development and scientific affairs.
Frearson told us Charles River wanted to partner with a company that would provide its clients with access to the most robust platform for integrated antibody discovery and development possible.
“We were also looking for a next-generation solution that provided genuine differentiation and improvement on existing platforms,” she said. “Distributed Bio’s libraries are incredibly diverse, well-engineered and naturally human, making it possible to improve the probability of success and speed of discovery for antibody drug candidates.”
Jake Glanville, PhD, founding partner and chief science officer at Distributed Bio, said the company was looking for a partner with the scale to match its growth, as it prepares to release the third generation of its discovery platform.
The San Francisco, CA-based company provides computationally optimized libraries for that can generate more than 5,000 unique hits against every antigen tested. According to the company, the platform expedites the discovery process to three to four months.
“Its early days in the partnership but already we are seeing significant interest and uptake from the market—Distributed Bio is clearly making therapeutic antibody companies rethink how they can discover antibodies to a broad range of targets and mechanisms in a fraction of the time of other platforms,” added Frearson.
Earlier this year, the research model and services provider also was granted commercial access to AstraZeneca’s high-throughput screening (HTS) and compound management infrastructure.
Charles River continues to expand through similar partner hips and capacity increases as it looks to double in size over the next five years, the CEO said in February.