ENPICOM: Addressing major hurdles in the antibody discovery process

ENPICOM’s Innovatiekrediet project, “Antibody development module for immunerepertoire sequencing analysis platform”, commenced in 2020 after securing a €500K contribution from Innovatiekrediet towards the €1.2M project costs. In the project, ENPICOM leveraged their cloud software solution, the IGX Platform, to build an Antibody Discovery Module (ADM), in order to address major hurdles in the antibody discovery process. The ADM enables researchers to select better candidate antibodies more quickly and de-risk their development through state-of-the-art structural liability analysis. As such, the ADM contributes to bringing better therapeutic antibodies to patients in need faster. Catalyze is proud to have supported ENPICOM towards the successful application to Innovatiekrediet. We heard from Jos Lunenberg, CEO of ENPICOM, about the project and collaboration.

Enabling more scientists to conduct Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR) analysis

Therapeutic antibodies continue to become an increasingly common treatment for a range of severe indications, such as cancer and auto-immune diseases. They have become the number one market segment in biologicals and five out of the top 10 best selling drugs globally are therapeutic antibodies. A key analytical method driving further development of immunotherapies is Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR) analysis, which exploits Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) to enable large scale investigation of T and B cell dynamics at the sequence level.

ENPICOM’s Innovatiekrediet project helped to overcome the lack of software solutions able to remove the complexity of managing and analyzing immune repertoire sequencing data – a major bottleneck in wider adoption of AIRR in immunotherapy development. The Antibody Discovery Module allows scientists to diversify their antibody candidate pool, and de-risk antibody development.

Jos Lunenberg, CEO of ENPICOM reflects on their Innovatiekrediet project and ADM:

“Our IGX Platform has the potential to serve a broad spectrum of applications in immunotherapy development. The ADM is a first vertical on the platform with an excellent product-market fit. The company has moved from start-up to scale-up since its launch and is proudly serving several top 25 biopharmaceutical companies and a series of SMEs in biotech and CROs dedicated to antibody discovery in the meantime.”

Collaborating for a win: ENPICOM & Catalyze

Catalyze and ENPICOM collaborated towards the successful proposal, in what was another success together after our previous partnership helped to build a European research consortium and secure a large Eurostars grant.

Jos reflects on the collaboration: “This project application was a good example of great multi-disciplinary teamwork. Members of both teams contributed exactly that which, on basis of their specific knowledge and expertise, was relevant and as a result jointly produced an application that clearly stood out and won.

“As the Catalyze team has been involved in many previous applications, they especially added value in deciding on the structure and focus of the application and making it an easy-to-read document for the reviewers.”

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