Next Generation Sequencing Software to Help Antibody Engineers, Bioinformaticians Uncover Potential Antibody Therapeutics
SANTA FE, N.M. – December 2, 2021 – OpenEye Scientific and Specifica, Inc., today announced they are releasing jointly developed software to help antibody engineers and bioinformaticians at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies advance antibody discovery by identifying diverse antibody sets with better properties for downstream therapeutics development.
Now available for launch customers, OpenEye’s Orion® Antibody Discovery Suite exclusively includes AbXtract™, an antibody discovery module developed by Specifica that is the first offering in the suite. AbXtract uses proprietary artificial intelligence methods to help antibody engineers and bioinformaticians analyze vast amounts of sequence data to uncover potential antibody therapeutics.
Orion, the only cloud-native fully integrated software-as-a-service molecular modeling platform, accelerates drug discovery science by combining the unlimited storage and computational scalability of Amazon Web Services with powerful tools for data sharing, visualization and analysis in an open development platform.
“We are excited to partner with OpenEye Scientific, a company that shares our vision of enabling teams of any size to undertake large-scale antibody discovery efforts,” said Andrew Bradbury, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Specifica. “We use next generation sequencing extensively at Specifica, and initially developed various bioinformatics tools for our in-house research. We then realized that many other antibody engineers could benefit and that led to the development of AbXtract.
“Using AbXtract for antibody discovery can be as simple as uploading a file to Orion and indicating how many leads are desired,” Bradbury said. “Expert users also can adjust many different parameters. What AbXtract does is democratize the use of next generation sequencing in antibody discovery, letting Orion take care of storage and analysis. Antibody discovery projects that were previously out of reach because of software, hardware, computation, or data sharing limitations have now become possible with AbXtract on Orion.”
Orion features an easy-to-use, web-based graphical interface and sophisticated analysis and reporting workflows. With the AbXtract antibody discovery module in the Orion Antibody Discovery Suite, researchers can process and characterize tens of millions of sequences, extract sequence- and function-based features, identify promising antibody leads, as well as share data and collaborate – all in real time.
“For nearly 25 years, world-leading organizations have relied on OpenEye to speed up their small molecule design efforts in drug discovery,” said Anthony Nicholls, CEO of OpenEye Scientific. “With our ground-breaking Orion platform, we can bring new science from exciting companies like Specifica to those customers seamlessly and efficiently. As therapeutic antibody discovery becomes increasingly important for treating disease, it is a privilege to partner with Specifica.”