European Pharmaceutical Review: Biologics- the Emerging Side of the Product Lifecycle

In European Pharmaceutical Review (EPR)’s latest issue, our CSO, Campbell Bunce, shares his perspectives on biologics and the emerging modalities associated with them.

Biotech bounces back

Aiding those emerging treatment modalities has been the recent surge of interest in biotech investments from Big Pharma.  As Campbell Bunce, CSO at Abzena, told EPR.

“The biotech sector has blossomed, in particular over the last 3-4 years, when obviously there were record investments going into biotech through the early to back-end of COVID.  But of course, that dried up significantly, so when we saw the massive drop in that through late 2022 and 2023, a lot of businesses suffered.  But because of our expertise and the services and platform technologies that we offer, we’ve been really well placed to take advantage, especially more recently, over the last 12-15 months, as we’ve seen that investment is coming back.  And it’s coming back into these complex biologics and bioconjugates.  So we’re seeing ADCs, and there’s no lack of investments there, in terms of pharma buying their way into this area, whether it’s acquisitions or licensing of ADCs themselves.”

Looking to take advantage of the current “fair wind of investment” in the newer modalities, ” the challenge is keeping up with that,” Bunce noted.  In terms of the future of biologics, Bunces said: “Antibodies, of course, are still there, very much so, and there are two aspects to antibodies.  One is the continuation of pure-play antibodies, and with AI coming along – particularly AI platforms that are looking to mine for and find new targets, when AI develops or identifies new targets or other folks’ algorithms that find antibodies, UK biotech Alchemab, for example, has a really interesting approach where they look at healthy patients within a disease population and they mine for antibodies that could be associated with a better outcome.

“There’s a lot of interest in these biologics, bi-specifics, next-generation antibody formats.  There’s going to be a combination of AI feeding back into antibodies and bi-specific development.

“From the technology side, we’re looking at a bit of an AI approach to more automating the design of the biologics piece; so, we’re just starting to do that and we’re talking to a bunch of other folks about their AI approaches and whether there’s synergy with what we do.”

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