Enpicom, a bioinformatics software engineering company, has announced a major release of its ImmunoGenomiX (IGX) platform featuring the new Antibody Discovery Module (ADM). This solution will allow scientists in biopharmaceutical companies and academia, as well as service providers working in the antibody discovery field, to make the most of their Sanger and NGS data and independently perform complex analyses.
Addressing the specific needs and challenges of researchers
In recent years, antibody discovery workflows have started relying more on sequencing data and in-silico analysis to identify the best candidates. However data integration, analysis, and visualization can be challenging and require diverse expertise, including immunology, protein biology, and bioinformatics. In close collaboration with over 50 industry leaders, Enpicom has pinpointed the bottlenecks and challenges in the antibody discovery process and validated the new product designed to solve these. It has now introduced a set of specialised IGX Platform Apps engineered to rapidly identify a diverse set of promising antibody candidates from integrated sequencing data.
“By conducting thorough interviews with a large group of industry leaders, we gained a deep understanding of the specific pain points and needs in the market,” explained Jos Lunenberg, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Enpicom. “We learned exactly what researchers need, and as a result, can offer something truly unique: a validated solution, tailored to the specific needs of antibody developers. This allows researchers without extensive bioinformatics expertise to independently perform their discovery analysis and stay focused on what matters the most – their research.”
“Extensive product discovery efforts have led to the identification of several new analyses and data management features that are key to the workflow of antibody developers.” commented Nicola Bonzanni, co-founder and Chief Product Officer. “With our new module built on top of the powerful IGX Platform core, we empower scientists to discover and perform in-depth analysis on drug candidate sequences in the context of therapeutic antibody development.”
Antibody discovery powered by innovative software analysis tools
The two new apps developed for the ADM release are IGX-Cluster and IGX-Branch. IGX-Cluster groups sequences based on user-defined parameters such as CDR3 similarity, gene usage, and CDR3 length. It effortlessly performs large clustering tasks in the cloud and supports a wide variety of workflows for both paired and unpaired receptor chains. Subsequently, IGX-Branch creates interactive visualisations to prioritize clusters and pick antibody candidates for follow-up analysis through information-rich phylogenetic trees.
The IGX platform is a professional tool to manage, analyse, integrate, and visualise immune repertoire sequencing data in a single environment. Technology-agnostic and code-free, it enables scientists to securely and effortlessly analyse immune repertoires. Together with the two new apps it provides an ideal setup for crucial tasks like candidate selection and hit expansion, thus creating a versatile system to discover promising antibody candidates.
Other prominent new features released today include revamped receptor profiling workflows and vastly improved metadata importing. The earlier announced collaboration with MiLaboratories has resulted in a new MiXCR app, fully embedded in the platform.
