Integrated Bioconjugate & ADC Development Services - Abzena

Looking for your link to better Antibody-Drug Conjugate development? Discover ThioBridge®

Contact Us What is ThioBridge®?

Overcome limitations with traditional linker technologies by using ThioBridge®. Abzena's unique ADC design & delivery conjugation technology that rapidly delivers next-gen results.

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What are the key benefits of ThioBridge®?

Enhanced ADC Stability

ThioBridge® ensures a uniform drug-to-antibody ratio (DAR) and stable linker attachment, significantly improving ADC stability.

Superior
Potency

ThioBridge® ADCs exhibit higher potency in mouse tumor models, promising more effective cancer treatment.

Improved Pharmacokinetics

Enhances the pharmacokinetic properties of ADCs, ensuring optimal functionality and extended circulation in the body.

Versatile Linker Architectures

ThioBridge® can work with various linker architectures, such as alpha-cyclodextrin and cyclic PEG ADCs, to increase potency and enhance tumor volume reduction.

Many linkers, particularly those used in first-generation ADC bioconjugation have limitations that can impact the safety and efficacy of the ADC. ThioBridge® has been developed by Abzena to overcome the limitations associated with traditional linker technologies.

ThioBridge® leverages our deep understanding and expertise in conjugation chemistry. ThioBridge® can work with various linker architectures, such as alpha-cyclodextrin and cyclic PEG ADCs, to increase potency and enhance tumor volume reduction.

What is ThioBridge®?

ThioBridge™: Improved ADC Design & Delivery - Abzena


ThioBridge™ is Abzena’s proprietary ADC conjugation and linker technology platform. As a solution ThioBridge® offers improved design and delivery of ADCs providing several benefits for bioconjugation and ADC development:

  • Creates a very stable and uniform DAR composition
  • Improves manufacturing efficiency through a high-yielding ADC platform with up to 80% single DAR species
  • Exhibits a high degree of stability in serum and being less prone to losing its payload in the body before it gets to its target
  • Allows for an extensive range of linker designs to optimize the stability, loading and function of the payload
  • Provides versatility in the range of different payloads with different functions that can be attached to antibodies

Find out more by downloading our info sheet and get in touch with our experts and see how we can move your ADC forward.

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We understand your challenges

Are you faced with?

Looking for a proven bioconjugate CDMO partner for an ADC development program and beyond

Searching for a partner that can prepare ADCs with 3rd party proprietary technologies

Researching a more streamlined design approach with a focus on delivering quality and minimizing risk

Trust isn’t given, it’s earned.

That’s why we’re proud to have over 20 years of bioconjugation and ADC expertise, producing over 400 ADC with 14+ conjugates in clinic including radiolabeled, oncology, and oligonucleotides, for customers around the world.

Whatever your ADC (or AOC/RDC) challenge, you can be confident that Abzena are ready to help move your bioconjugate development program forward.

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Customer Case Study: ThioBridge® Conjugates

Access our case study entitled ‘ThioBridge® Conjugates’, to learn more about how our proprietary technology can improve the potency, efficacy, and stability of your ADC program as bridges from preclinical into the clinic.

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Take a look at the big questions from a Q&A at World ADC

Can you tell us more about your unique platforms to develop and design linkers?

Abzena’s ThioBridge® platform is a technology that achieves homogeneous drug loading to antibodies without the need for protein engineering or enzymatic approaches. It involves a cysteine re-bridging approach that produces ADC’s with highly homogeneous drug loading at the antibody’s inherent interchain disulphides. ThioBridge® is a bis-sulfone bis-alkylating linker unit capable of reacting at the four accessible interchain disulphides and the resulting ADCs are typically produced with high conversion to DAR 4.

How does Abzena optimize linker payloads to improve potency, selectivity, and pharmacokinetic profiles?

ADCs with drugs bound via ThioBridge® technology have been shown to have a high degree of stability in a series of incubation studies in rat and human serum and avoid the deconjugation and cross-conjugation that is seen with maleimide coupling. The ThioBridge® linker chemistry produces site specifically coupled ADCs that are stable and have well defined PK profiles.

What are your thoughts on the growing abundance of conjugation technologies available, and what do you think has been the catalyst for it?

Bioconjugation is expanding the repertoire of drug modalities available to address previously intractable targets with precision and positively impact both rare and common life-limiting diseases. The most widely known examples are antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and while the field is still relatively nascent, this modality has become increasingly prevalent in cancer treatments in the last 2 decades.

ADCs are being established as the standard of care in breast cancer. Many other novel ADCs are in development for lung, gastric, ovarian and colorectal cancer and have the potential to supersede existing small molecule chemotherapies.

Clinical success and the market potential of these ‘new’ modalities are key drivers for interest in this exciting area. There is a lot of potential still to be explored and we know that it is vital to expand the toolbox of options to enable bioconjugation to reach its full potential.

What are the biggest challenges you see in linker and conjugation design at the moment?

The biggest challenge we see currently in linker and conjugate design is a lack of variety of linker chemistry being used across the industry. Also when entering drug development, there is the regulatory requirement to demonstrate that the bioconjugate has the required target quality profile. Selecting the right analytical methods to provide an accurate assessment is vital and when nominating an ADC, or other bioconjugated molecule, for clinical development. Suitable, robust methods for both purification and analysis must be determined. As we expand the available linkers and provide the industry with new, more creative and flexible options that are able to address key challenges, suitable fit-for-purpose analysis is vital/imperative.

What sets Abzena apart?

Access to Genuine Scientific & Technical Experts

We have over 20 years of experience in delivering solutions at each stage of the development lifecycle from early-stage research and discovery, through lead candidate selection, and onward into process development and GMP manufacture.

Unlike most other service providers, we can provide technical and scientific support that truly spans early-stage research through process development and GMP manufacturing under a single organization to better ensure that the TPP can be achieved. Our global scientific teams have extensive experience in overcoming some of the most challenging and complex biologic and bioconjugate programs, making us the perfect partner for novel and disruptive technologies that other biopharmaceutical CDMOs may shy away from.

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Proactive Problem Solving to Ensure Downstream Success

Our experienced team is focused on getting it right from the start. We identify and address challenges early in drug design to better ensure downstream clinical and commercial success. We also have expertise in fixing and optimizing drugs in later stage development to rescue them from the drug development graveyard.

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Diverse & Interconnected Expertise Under a Single Organization

With capabilities ranging from bioassays to cell line development, bioconjugation and clinical and commercial manufacturing, all under one organization, we can reduce the white space in the development path, which ultimately minimizes risk, reduces costs and accelerates timelines for our customers.

As an integrated service provider, we accelerate timelines through the ease of technical and materials transfer, and improved scheduling. Better workflows and processes can also be attained through improved knowledge transfer between internal multidisciplinary experts and the development of a deep understanding of the drug as it progresses from target to lead selection and process development and manufacture.

Biologic Services

Driven by Innovation to Streamline Development

Our team is always seeking new ways to innovate and streamline development for our customers. Our extensive scientific capabilities and proprietary solutions like EpiScreen® 2.0, Composite Proteins™, Composite Human Antibodies™, AbZelectPRO™, ThioBridge™, and LabZient™ are designed to give your program the best chance of clinical and commercial success.

  • EpiScreen® 2.0 — an extensive suite of bioinformatic and primary human cell-based assays for immunogenicity assessment to inform of potential safety and efficacy risks in the clinic.
  • Composite Human Antibody™ — a platform used for designing safer, more effective, humanized antibodies.
  • Composite Proteins™ — a deimmunization technology that designs safer and more effective therapeutic proteins, devoid of human T cell epitopes, to minimize potential immunogenicity in patients without compromising activity.
  • AbZelectPRO™ — high-yielding cell line development (CLD) platform for accelerating the generation of production cell lines for manufacture of antibodies and recombinant proteins.
  • ThioBridge® — a next-generation conjugation linker technology proven to enhance ADC development by overcoming issues with existing technologies to improve stability, potency, and efficacy.
  • LabZient™ — our analytical platform that combines predictive in-silico evaluation with laboratory methods to de-risk the application of platform analytical procedures and expedites the pathway to IND.
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A history of successfully moving bioconjugates forward

20+

years of complex biologics and bioconjugation services experience

2000+

conjugates developed for critical assays, and lead candidate selections with over 400 ADCs produced

50+

bioconjugation programs scaled up to produce multi gram batches

 

We offer a full range of ADC and bioconjugate capabilities with the ability to design and optimize ADCs for any known target antigen.


Tell us what you need to move your ADC or bioconjugate forward. We’ll tell you how we can work together to make that happen.