In the last decades, a growing emphasis has been on finding effective therapeutic products against major diseases within oncology, CNS, immunology etc. outside the realm of traditional small molecules. In 2017, just monoclonal antibodies had total sales worth €83.8bn. In the recent years, the range of non-small molecule candidates has widened. Thus, today significant resources are invested in new modalities and new modes of actions, e.g. polyclonal antibodies, PROTACS and similar targeted protein degradation models, incl. AbTACs, AAVs, exosomes, nanodiscs, nucleotide-based vaccines, conformational changing molecules, aptamers and other nanoparticles etc. In targeted protein degradation alone, over USD 3.5bn was invested and +90 high value licensing deals were inked since 2014. In Q3 2019, investment in this area accounted for 35% of the total investment, and it is anticipated to grow at an annualised rate of over 30%.
These new entities, incl. antibody-based drugs are complex in construct and administration.
Being based on relative signal changes in parameters assumingly linked to biological and molecular reactions, current technologies used for functional characterisation and quantification were not designed to fully address the efficacy and safety issues of these new drug modalities and thereby. I.e. research in industry and academia in this area are often held back by suboptimal data based on assumed correlations.
Our overall objective is to provide a technology that can enable researchers to push their research within the broad range of proteins, other biomolecules constructs and nanoparticles beyond the current boundaries to allow society to take full advantage of these new therapeutic models.
With fast, direct, quantitative measurements and an ability to analyse proteins and large complex nanoparticles up to 1,000 nm in diameter incl. viruses, exosomes, liposomes, membrane structures etc., the FIDA technology holds a unique potential of addressing these needs. With just a few microliters of plasma, serum, fermentation media etc., without purification, additional to immunogenicity, the technology provides researchers with an array of validated, quantitative data about binding affinity, stoichiometry, aggregations, integrity, oligomerisation, multiple binding, conformational changes, etc.
