In 2007, Thayer engineering professor Tillman Gerngross founded Adimab, an antibody discovery company that develops therapeutic antibodies against infectious disease targets, alongside his colleague and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dane Wittrup. The company recently developed a new technology that allows them to quickly identify antibodies effective at combating diseases such as Ebola, Zika and other viruses.
Last month, Adimab reported the isolation of a broad panel of neutralizing anti-Ebola virus antibodies from a survivor of the recent Zaire outbreak.
Antibodies bind to the viruses or bacteria and prevent them from infecting the person’s cells, Adimab senior scientist Laura Walker said.
Gerngross said that Adimab, headquartered in nearby Lebanon, has approximately 70 employees and partners with over 35 pharmaceutical companies. The genesis of the company come from the realization that the pharmaceutical industry needs the best tools to discover new drugs — including antibodies — in order to continue to innovate in finding new treatments for human diseases, he said.
In only six weeks, Walker and her team were able to identify and clone out 300 antibodies that all bind to the surface of the Ebola virus using a 15 milliliter blood sample of a survivor from the 2014 Ebola outbreak. The work, published in the journal Science, highlights the speed of Adimab’s recently launched single B cell isolation platform. The 300 antibodies also constitute the largest panel of functional anti-Ebola antibodies ever reported in the scientific literature, according to a press release.
Gerngross said that the technique developed is faster than anything that has been done in the past and will allow for a deeper insight into why this patient may have survived.
The team subsequently sent the antibodies to laboratories that specialize in testing the potency of antibodies at neutralizing the Ebola virus, Approximately 5 percent of the antibodies are very potent neutralizers and those are what most likely saved that patient, he said.
Gerngross said this is exciting because in the future one could quickly identify the antibodies that bind the virus out of the patient’s blood to assess their potency in neutralizing the infection. Because Adimab made their data publicly available, it is very accessible for someone to turn these potent antibodies into a drug against Ebola. Since viruses are a public health crisis and there was no major commercial opportunity, Adimab decided to share their findings. Because the same approach will work for new viral threats that pop up in the future, policy makers will be challenged to take action, he said.
“This is not a scientific problem,” Gerngross said. “This is a question of will and political willpower to act and make something happen. We don’t have a framework in which anyone is commercially incentivized to make a drug for five people.”
He added the he currently has five molecules from the antibodies in clinical trial and is planning on adding another four to five this year.
“It’s just incredible the impact you can actually have on patients and that is very limited when you are in an academic lab,” Gerngross said. “In an academic lab, you can make discoveries but you’re not going to be the person that develops the drug that goes out to people. For me, the metric that we as academics should be thinking about of how we are impacting the world has many dimensions.”
Gerngross said that in the past academics have focused on the number of papers one gets published or how much grant money one brings in. However, he said, touching lives and helping to find cures are far more important in academic work. He added that he fuses his work with Adimab with his teaching at Thayer so that his students can be exposed to “real-world experiences” and see how biotechnology has the potential to impact lives.
Walker’s assistant Eileen Goodwin ’15 said that working labs at Dartmouth gave her general experience and lab skills for her job at Adimab.
“General lab skills are helpful for working in a lab and just knowing what to expect in terms of data processing and keeping everything straight,” she said. “Right now, I’m working on some projects with Laura that are very invasive so honestly the lab organizational skills are probably the biggest thing.”
