Integral Molecular provides rapid safety testing of COVID-19 antibody therapeutics with its Membrane Proteome Array Technology

Integral Molecular, the leader in discovering and characterizing antibodies against membrane protein and viral targets, is applying its Membrane Proteome Array (MPA) technology for antibody specificity profiling to promote the rapid development of SARS-CoV-2 therapeutic antibodies.

Researchers from Abound Bio and collaborators used the MPA to profile a promising monoclonal antibody that targets and neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 virus with high potency by blocking its binding to the ACE2 protein, the key interaction that drives infection. As described in a recent pre-print on bioRxiv, this antibody did not show off-target binding to any human proteins on the MPA and is being progressed for further development.

“Integral Molecular’s cutting-edge MPA technology quickly provided us with the reassurance that Abound Bio’s potent, neutralizing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 did not bind off-target human membrane proteins which could be associated with toxicity,” said John W. Mellors, MD, CEO of Abound Bio.

“Off-target antibody binding can induce serious adverse clinical events,” said Dimiter Dimitrov, PhD, ScD, CSO of Abound Bio. “For this high-priority project, we relied on Integral Molecular’s rapid specificity profiling to rule out liabilities arising from unexpected antibody cross-reactivity in human cells.”

Recent data show that as many as 25% of preclinical antibodies have off-target binding to unintended protein targets, which can lead to serious adverse events in patients. The MPA is a collection of 6,000 membrane proteins expressed in live cells, representing nearly the entire human membrane proteome. The MPA provides specificity results in less than a month, faster than traditional non-clinical safety studies. Rapidly eliminating drug candidates with off-target effects or other liabilities can accelerate the safe progression of therapeutics into the clinic.

With 20 years of excellence in virology research, Integral Molecular has quickly mobilized several of its technologies to combat COVID-19 and recently launched an antibody neutralization test using pseudotyped SARS-CoV-2 reporter viruses.