Description
Monoclonal antibodies represent a highly successful class of therapeutics that are used to treat complex diseases across a wide range of therapeutic areas. However, their high cost and variable patient response underscores the need for new modalities that can be used to activate or suppress the immune system. Aptamers have long been viewed as a simpler alternative to antibodies, but challenges with biostability, effectiveness, and throughput have slowed their progress in the clinic. In this talk, I will discuss a path for democratizing antibody therapeutics that relies a class of molecules called threomers, which are highly functionalized synthetic nucleic acids assembled on a biologically stable threose nucleic acid (TNA) framework. I will describe the underlying chemistry and enzyme engineering developed to support a high throughput discovery pipeline and provide examples of recently discovered threomers that mirror the binding properties of antibodies.
Speaker: John Chaput, PhD, Professor - University of California, Irvine
