Webinar: Harnessing the Power of Bispecific Antibodies

Bispecific antibodies (bsAbs) can simultaneously bind to two separate and unique epitopes on the same or different antigens, sparking intense interest among the scientific community in recent years. Their dual specificity for soluble antigens has been explored extensively for various therapeutic applications, including cancer therapies and virus neutralization.

Creative Biolabs has invited Dr. Archana Thakur and Dr. Luca Varani to walk us through how they utilize the power of bsAbs to 1) arm "headless CAR T cells" and serially kill tumor targets and 2) neutralize wild-type SARS-CoV-2 and its variants and suppress viral escape.

New insights you will learn through the following two key topics we will discuss in this webinar:

1. Bispecific Antibody Armed Metabolically Enhanced Headless CAR T Cells

• The design of bsAb armed metabolically enhanced headless CAR T cells (hCART)
• The generation of bsAb armed metabolically enhanced hCART
• The efficacy of bsAb armed metabolically enhanced hCART in preclinical studies

2. Bispecific Antibody Protects from SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern and Prevents Viral Escape in Mice

• The development of the bispecific IgG1-like molecule (CoV-X2)
• CoV-X2 neutralizes wild-type SARS-CoV-2 and its variants in preclinical studies
• CoV-X2 protects mice from infection and suppresses viral escape

Webinar Recording

Speakers

Archana Thakur, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Medicine, School of Medicine
Director, Human Cellular Therapeutics cGMP Core
University of Virginia

Dr. Thakur facilitates the scientific, strategic, and operational directions for the clinical immunotherapy product development and oversees the manufacturing of bispecific antibodies and bispecific antibody-armed activated T cells (BATs) in the cGMP facility, as well as the immune monitoring studies on the protocol-driven clinical trials. Dr. Thakur's research activities focus on 1) developing new and innovative approaches to enhancing anti-tumor cellular and humoral immune responses by attenuating the immune-suppressing cellular and humoral factors within the tumor microenvironment and, 2) identifying immune biomarkers to develop immune signatures for therapeutic responses.

Luca Varani, Ph.D.

Group Leader, Institute for Research in Biomedicine
Università della Svizzera italiana
Bellinzona, Switzerland

Dr. Varani leads the Structural Biology group in the IRB to characterize interactions between pathogens and antibodies, as well as molecules of the immune system. Using a highly multidisciplinary approach spanning from computational biology, structure determination, cellular experiments, to antibody production and engineering, Dr. Varani's group tries to understand molecular properties that allow a given antibody to eliminate a pathogen, involving rare and neglected diseases such as Dengue or Zika virus, prion diseases, and a rare form of Leukemia.