15 March 2019 - - Canada-based therapeutic antibodies developer AbCellera has inked a two-year agreement with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help accelerate global health research, the company said.

The funding, totaling USD 4.8m, will support a series of scientific collaborations between AbCellera and Gates Foundation-funded scientists working on the prevention and treatment of high-priority infectious diseases.

The target diseases including HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis infect hundreds of millions of people annually and disproportionately impact developing countries.

Research projects will benefit from AbCellera's industry-leading capabilities in human antibody discovery and immune repertoire profiling to accelerate the development of vaccines and antibody-based treatments for use in global health.

This is the second collaboration between the two organizations.

In 2017, AbCellera worked with the Gates Foundation on the discovery of high-affinity monoclonal antibodies against 10 biomarkers associated with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection, the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis. The resulting antibodies were instrumental in the successful development of high-sensitivity diagnostic tests.

The collaborations funded under the present agreement will benefit from AbCellera's new technology capabilities for deep profiling of antibody responses.

In August 2018, AbCellera announced the acquisition of Lineage Biosciences, a spinout company that pioneered the use of next-generation sequencing technology (Rep-Seq) to capture the full diversity of antibodies generated by natural immune responses.

Rep-Seq complements the unique functional information obtained from AbCellera's single-cell discovery platform, increasing the diversity of antibodies identified and enabling a more rational vaccine design.

AbCellera is a privately held company that engages in partnerships to discover and develop next-generation therapeutic antibodies.

AbCellera's single-cell platform integrates end-to-end capabilities for therapeutic antibody discovery through a unique combination of technologies including proprietary immunizations, microfluidics, high-throughput imaging, genomics, deep computation, artificial intelligence, and laboratory automation.

Ultra-deep screening of single B cells allows unprecedented access to natural immune responses, enabling rapid isolation of large and diverse panels of lead antibodies from any species, including humans.