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Seagen is an industry leader in ADC research and the use of this technology in the treatment of cancer. ADCs are designed to harness the targeting power of antibodies to deliver small molecule drugs to the tumor. This innovative approach to therapy offers meaningful efficacy while reducing side effects for patients.
We identify and engineer antibodies that target tumor-expressed antigens to serve as the foundation of our ADCs
We’re developing new classes of highly specific ADC linkers
We’re identifying novel small molecule drugs for our ADC technologies
Working on antibody–drug conjugates is sort of like a cell biologist’s best dream. You get to think about all these really complicated properties of cancer cells, starting from the tumor antigen that's expressed on the cancer cells.
How ADCs work
The dual potential to efficiently kill cancer cells directly, and to do it in a way that elicits highly focused immune recognition of tumors, holds enormous promise for combination with checkpoint inhibitors.
What I like about working at Seagen is that solving design challenges is not the responsibility of a single group.
At Seagen, we employ SEA technology, an approach that may improve the immune response to cancer cells. By growing our antibody-producing cells in the presence of the 2-fluorofucose sugar, we block the cellular fucosylation pathway. This creates afucosylated antibodies that can bind more tightly to an activating receptor on innate immune cells increasing receptor cross-linking and improving antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity, an important antitumor immune response.6,7
In addition to our antibody–drug conjugate technology that directly delivers small molecule payloads to tumor cells, we’re also developing therapies that can empower antibodies to directly stimulate the immune system to destroy tumors.
We are employing the SEA technology in multiple new ways. Our goal is to build novel therapeutics that are safe and effective for cancer patients.
Some antigen targets are expressed on normal tissue, leading to unacceptable toxicity. To overcome this challenge, Seagen has developed a novel masking technology that prevents antibody binding to antigen on normal tissues, but is cleaved selectively by proteases enriched in the tumor microenvironment. This allows the unmasked antibody to selectively bind to its antigen target in tumors but not in normal tissues.
I’m most interested in using protein engineering to improve the targeting of our ADCs using novel approaches such as masking technology.
Our lead technology uses peptides that coil around each other to form a really stable structure, and this structure is what blocks the binding of the antibody to its target
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