Research Collaborations

Always learning, we support strategic research projects across academia and industry that expand the horizons of VHH therapeutic development.

Clinical validation

Our long-standing collaboration with Professor Martin Dyer’s haemato-oncology group at the University of Leicester, UK, supports the development of VHH-based bi-specifics for blood cancer applications.

We have a shared vision to unite Isogenica’s rapid VHH discovery and engineering capabilities with UoL’s clinical experience and access to novel platforms to create an arsenal of bi-specific immunotherapies offering new options to patients with refractory cancers.

This joint Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) grant from Innovate UK will test an array of VHH-based bi-specifics in a “virtual cancer patient” model developed by the Dyer lab. Read more here

Our iCASE sponsorship of PhD student Natasha Spena has developed BCMA-based bi-specific T cell engagers with an improved balance between efficacy (target cell killing) and safety (T cell activation) compared with clinical benchmarks. You can read more about Natasha’s work by downloading her conference poster for the British Society for Haematology below:

“We are really excited to be working with Isogenica to drive this innovative partnership and ultimately improve patient outcomes.” – Dr Harriet Walter, Associate Professor in Medical Oncology

Download poster on In vitro Validation of Modular VHH-based Bi-specific Antibodies for Haemo-Oncology by Natasha Carmen Spena to read more

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Knowledge transfer and improving efficiency

We team up with others, combining our expertise with theirs to accelerate research around shared issues and to make our discovery work harder and faster.

Through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership, we’re working with researchers at the University of Nottingham and Aston University to apply machine learning tools to our own way of working. Read more.

We are advancing our drug discovery efforts by using PipeBio’s bioinformatics cloud for analysing our synthetic VHH libraries. Read more.

Working with scientists at the Oncode Institute and University Medical Center Utrecht, we identified a potential VHH treatment of Wnt-hypersentive tumours. The collaboration used our fully synthetic, highly diverse LlamdA™ library to screen for Wnt pathway inhibitors using our CIS display technology. Read more.

Cost effective manufacturing solutions

We collaborate with others to make manufacturing VHH antibodies faster, easier to scale-up, cheaper and safer.

Our collaboration with Phenotypeca has shown how the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae can be used for faster, safer and cheaper bioproduction of high-quality mono- and multi-specific VHH antibodies. Read more.

Working alongside researchers at Queen Mary, we explored novel methods of producing antibodies that can potentially overcome the current problems associated with using E. coli. Read more.

“Isogenica’s vast knowledge and deep understanding of VHHs contributed greatly to the project’s success, especially in generating the high-quality data needed to demonstrate the full functionality of the VHHs we produced.” – Phenotypeca