Over the years, some of the Asian companies have made significant breakthroughs in antibody research and are exploring further avenues to enrich their pipeline of products. The developments are significant even in the world market. BioSpectrum gives an overview of the major developments in the field:

Rabbit monoclonal antibody
Taiwan-based Abnova has integrated a high throughput platform for generation of rabbit monoclonal antibody. Conventional rabbit monoclonal antibody technology uses myeloma fusion for screening of rabbit monoclone hybridoma. This methodology has a narrow antibody repertoire and poor yield of antibody secretion from rabbit hybridoma. Abnova uses a non-fusion antibody library to screen for a greater number of clones of highest affinity and exquisite specificity. The selected clone is introduced into a proprietary expression vector for transient and scalable antibody production for many downstream applications.

According to the company, technology accessibility, intellectual property and higher costs have long hampered a widespread adoption and application of the rabbit monoclonal antibody. Removal of this barrier is critical to the success of proteomics and the biotech industry where traditional antibody tools, such as mouse monoclonal antibody and rabbit polyclonal antibody, face limitations.

CD19 (Human) Matched Antibody Pair, CEBPA (Human) Recombinant Protein (P01), ERCC8 (Human) Recombinant Protein (P01), GZMB (Human) Recombinant Protein (P03) and KRT15 (Human) Recombinant Protein (P02) are some of the antibodies developed by Abnova.

Human antibodies for cancer
Australia-based Patrys, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, has developed PAT-SM6, a natural human antibody, that has shown promise as a potential treatment for multiple types of cancer, including melanoma. Patrys was recently granted a US patent for its lead antibody product till at least 2024.