ACROBiosystems collaborates with Carterra for screening drug candidates

ACROBiosystems, a cornerstone of the global biopharmaceutical and health industries, announces its collaboration with Carterra, a leading provider of innovative technologies designed to accelerate the discovery of novel therapeutic antibodies. Through the combination of ACROBiosystems’ high-quality multi-pass transmembrane proteins and Carterra’s innovative LSA platform, large-scale comprehensive characterization of drug candidates using high-throughput surface plasmon resonance (HT-SPR) can be rapidly performed.

Transmembrane targets, especially multi-pass ones, have been considered ‘undruggable’ targets that have garnered widespread interest. Despite encouraging improvements in the tools to screen for therapeutics against membrane-bound targets, there are still many practical limitations owing to the challenges of working with proteins that are not highly stable outside of the cell-membrane environment.

The use of high-quality, full-length transmembrane proteins is critical for the accurate characterization of drug candidates. Following transmembrane protein evaluations to confirm purity, structure and bioactivity, HT-SPR can subsequently be performed with confidence to screen for drug candidates. These techniques highlight that with stable receptor formats, both generalized binding and detailed kinetics can be ascertained. The rapid throughput of the Carterra LSA platform reduces the time the receptor must remain stable and helps to mitigate losses in activity which can occur on lower throughput screening approaches that require longer to complete a screening assay. While this work was done using intact monoclonal antibodies, the approach could easily be extended to any drug format including nanobodies, scFvs, aptamers, and even arrays of DEL compounds.

ACROBiosystem’s expertise in developing high-quality recombinant proteins paired with Carterra’s innovative LSA platform enables customers to access a greater breadth and depth of information for up to thousands of potential drug candidates, accelerating the research and development process for groundbreaking therapies.