Abkyu employs in vivo techniques and machine learning to rapidly discover VHHs that meet specific therapeutic requirements, utilizing custom immunization protocols and advanced bioinformatics for immune response analysis. This approach addresses the need for high-affinity, specific VHHs with ideal developability characteristics in the development of next-generation therapeutics.
Funding
Funding not disclosed
Founders
Product
Problem
Traditional VHH discovery methods using naive or synthetic libraries often yield antibodies with suboptimal affinity, developability challenges, and screening limitations, especially against complex cell surface targets. Existing in vivo approaches may suffer from low screening throughput, reliance on serum titer, and limited capture of immune response diversity.
Solution
AbKyu employs in vivo immunization and advanced machine learning to accelerate the discovery of high-quality VHHs (single-domain antibodies) tailored for demanding therapeutic applications. By leveraging the natural camelid immune system, AbKyu identifies VHHs with a range of high affinities, improved developability, and high specificity to soluble and cell-based targets, including multi-spanning membrane proteins. The Immune Monitor workflow captures the evolving immune response using next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics pipelines, enabling rapid VHH make-test cycles and early validation of hits with ideal biophysical and functional properties. AbKyu's approach overcomes the limitations of traditional methods by providing expanded sequence and functional diversity, faster identification of VHHs, and fully owned partner deliverables.
Target Audience
AbKyu serves pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies seeking VHH antibodies for therapeutic development, particularly those targeting complex cell surface proteins or requiring specific developability profiles.
Features
- Custom immunization protocols and adjuvant strategies to elicit tailored immune responses in camelids
- Deep repertoire sequencing and archiving of millions of antigen-specific B cells
- Proprietary bioinformatics pipeline for thorough interrogation of VHH repertoire and identification of high-value candidates
- Rapid VHH make-test cycles for early validation of hits with ideal biophysical and functional properties
- VHH humanization services utilizing CDR grafting, point mutation, and resurfacing techniques
- Comprehensive VHH characterization suite, including on- and off-target binding ELISA, epitope binning, affinity measurement by BLI/SPR, and cell-based functional assays
- Developability screening to evaluate thermal stability, hydrophobicity, polyreactivity, and solubility
- Specialized VHH discovery services for cell surface targets, including GPCRs, ion channels, and other multi-pass membrane proteins