• Poster No.: 1P-132
  • Presentation time: September 9　14:00-15:00
  • Title: Antibody engineering for potent anti-cancer therapeutics
  • Author(s): Yong-Sung Kim（Dept. of Molecular Science and Technol. Ajou Univ.）

Abstract

Monoclonal antibody has been very successful therapeutic agent in various diseases, including cancers, inflammatory diseases, and autoimmune diseases. However, there are still lots of room to improve the potency. Particularly, in anti-cancer therapy, antibody treatments as a single agent have shown little bit disappointing poor response. Thus mAbs have been all approved as combined therapy with anti-cancer chemicals. To improve the therapeutic potency, there have been numerous efforts to engineer mAbs. These efforts include development of bispecific antibody and antibody-drug conjugates.
In this talk I will focus on our effort to improve the potency of solid tumor targeting mAbs. The limited localization and penetration of monoclonal antibodies (mAb) into solid tumors restricts their antitumor efficacy. To overcome these limits, we designed a novel solid tumor-penetrating antibody format, mAb-A22p, by genetic fusion of high-affinity neuropilin-targeting A22p peptide to the C-terminus of the heavy chain of the conventional mAbs, such as anti-EGFR cetuximab and anti-Her2 trastuzumab. The mAb-A22p antibodies showed much better tumor homing, extravasation from the vessels, and tumor tissue penetration, resulting in more potent antitumor efficacy, compared with the parent mAbs. This study indicates that mAb-A22p is a superior format for solid tumor-targeting therapeutic antibodies.