Antibodies are a specialised class of proteins that also carry carbohydrate groups. They are made by human immune cells to attack and clear the body of disease agents including cancer cells, bacteria and viruses.
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An antibody molecule consists of a protein “backbone” to which various forms of carbohydrates (sugars) are attached.
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From infancy, the body's immune system normally makes antibodies that neutralise disease and help to maintain health. Our bodies frequently encounter viruses and bacteria and create pre-cancerous and cancerous cells, but antibodies and other components of the immune system are able to deal with them to prevent the development of disease.
However, the immune system can fail to keep up due to age, sickness, or genetic, environmental (eg pollution, smoking) and other factors, which leads to disease.
Ideally, it would be possible to capture human immune cells and the effective human antibodies those cells naturally produce, and expand them outside the body to enable the development of natural human antibodies as commercial therapeutics when needed to fight disease. To date, success in achieving this has been limited due mainly to the fact that human immune cells do not naturally survive outside the body and therefore cannot be expanded to produce sufficient human antibodies to support therapeutic development.
In the absence of established technologies that allowed for the effective proliferation of human immune cells and resulting production of human antibodies, scientists generally instead developed and deployed several alternative antibody technologies. These alternative antibody technologies form the basis of all antibody therapeutics approved for production and sale in the global market today. In contrast, Patrys' proprietary technology enables the capture and production of natural human antibodies with the aim of developing natural human antibody-based therapeutics.
