Empowered Patient Podcast Creating Monoclonal Antibodies for Treatment and Protection with Dave Hering Invivyd
Dave Hering, Chief Executive Officer and Director at Invivyd, draws on his experience with vaccines working at Pfizer and research on monoclonal antibodies to engineer targeted monoclonal antibodies to treat diseases like cancer and prevent diseases like COVID-19. Providing antibodies, particularly to immunocompromised people, overcomes the limitations of vaccines and reduces the risk of severe outcomes from diseases.
Dave elaborates, "Antibodies are made by humans. They're made in response to an antigen, a virus being introduced into the body. Frequently, the starting point for these antibodies is to take blood and serum from people infected from a disease and look for these antibodies. And so that's the starting way. We call that mining antibodies. You can get them from survivors of different diseases and then use them to generate and create antibodies that look like that."
"And so Invivyd does the same thing. We start with those. But with our technology and a partnership with a company called Adimab, we've perfected this engineering that does this affinity maturation. You can do this in yeast cells. And do it and replicate it thousands and thousands of times with minor tweaks, and see how it will perform against those viruses. And so, by running those types of experiments, you're doing more precision—making modifications and finding antibodies that now aren't just the ones that your body produces but have been optimized to neutralize the virus."
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