Absci Opens New Campus to Accelerate Biological Agent Discovery
The facility is located a short distance from downtown, where the company has been housed for the past four years, and includes 85,000 square feet of laboratory, office, and meeting space.
The new scalable laboratory space is designed to maximize flow, increase capacity and be easily reconfigured if necessary, the company said.
The integration of internal tissue culture capacities, analytical instruments with high throughput, advanced liquid handling and automation as well as a special clean air fermentation facility in connection with an external computing cluster facilitate the expanded scope of its R&D activities, said the innovator.
Integrated technologies for high-volume data collection throughout the company’s workflow generate the input for the continuous training of its deep learning AI models for drug discovery and cell line design, the company added.
Optimizing the drug candidate prediction process
The Absci platform was developed to develop and generate protein-based drug candidates and to test them for their optimal function. After the company’s successful IPO, we spoke to CEO Sean McClain in July.
“One of the exciting things about our technology is that we can study billions of different drug candidates in a single experiment to study protein functionality and manufacturing capabilities. We feed this data into our deep learning models and can ultimately go completely in silico, where we can predict the best drug candidate for a specific target and the associated production cell line. In the future, data will power our business and ultimately allow us to get the best drugs to patients at a truly unprecedented rate, “he said at the time.
The company says protein-based drugs or biologics have already changed vaccine development, oncology therapies, and treatments for chronic diseases like diabetes, but these breakthroughs only scratch the surface of what is possible. “The next generation of biologics will be able to treat the most complex diseases such as neurological and autoimmune diseases in a very targeted and even personalized way. Proteins have unlimited potential and can be made extremely specific. “
Alliance with EQRx
And earlier this month, Absci announced that it is partnering with pharmaceutical company EQRx to collaboratively develop and develop multiple clinical candidates in multiple therapeutic areas, including oncology and immunology.
“EQRx came to us specifically to leverage our ability to quickly discover new protein-based drugs of any modality – think new formats like T-cell engagers, bispecifics, VHHs – using our AI models and proprietary assays to target candidates in to develop and optimize in full-length format and in the scalable production cell line, ”the CEO explained to us at the time.