AlgoNomics NV has entered into an agreement granting Genmab A/S access to AlgoNomics' Epibase platform for T-cell epitope identification.

Epibase is AlgoNomics' proprietary platform for T-cell epitope identification. This epitope dicovery is applied to vaccine development in the cancer and infectious diseases field, as well as to protein epitope profiling and Immunotuning.

The uniqueness of Epibase resides in its capability to identify all T-cell epitopes for any collection of proteins from any biological source (viral, cancer or other), for all HLA types covering most of the human population. The approach allows to document and optimize leads such as vaccines and therapeutic proteins for any specific population, claims a company release.

According to Dr. Jan van de Winkel, CSO of Genmab, "Epibase can be used to validate the intrinsically low immunogenicity of our fully human therapeutic antibody leads that are currently in clinical and pre-clinical phases."

Dr. Ignace Lasters, CEO of AlgoNomics, comments: "We are pleased to be working with Genmab. This important player in the therapeutic antibody field recognizes the value that Epibase® can bring to further optimize as well as expedite its product development cycle".

Unlike learning-based methods, Epibase can identify epitopes for those HLA sub-types for which little or no experimental data is available. In addition, Epibase has the intrinsic capacity to identify epitopes sequence patterns that would not be recognized by learning-based tools, the company says in the release.