Research

Targeted therapies aim to selectively recognize and eliminate diseased cells while sparing healthy tissues, offering the potential for greater efficacy and reduced toxicity compared with conventional treatments. Our research focuses on antibody-based targeting strategies, harnessing the exquisite specificity of antibodies to develop innovative therapeutic approaches. We explore diverse modalities, including antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) for targeted delivery of potent payloads, multispecific antibodies to engage multiple molecular targets or cellular interactions, and CAR T-cell therapies, which extend antibody-derived target recognition to engineered immune cells. By combining molecular insight with innovative antibody engineering, we aim to develop next-generation targeted therapies with improved specificity and efficacy.

Our antibody discovery activities are centered on the design and generation of synthetic naïve phage display libraries, which are developed and optimized in-house to enable the rapid identification of binders for therapeutic modalities such as ADCs, multi-specific antibodies and CAR-T cells. This platform provides a broad sequence diversity and affinity range and allows antibody discovery to be tailored to desired functional properties. Complementary to phage display, we also employ hybridoma technology to generate and characterize monoclonal antibodies when appropriate. Together, these approaches provide a versatile foundation for the discovery and development of novel antibodies for research and therapeutic applications.

Our research in bioconjugation and protein engineering focuses on the development and application of state-of-the-art site-specific conjugation technologies to generate precisely defined antibody and protein conjugates. We employ and further develop a range of tag-based approaches, including Tub-tag, Sortag, and Q-tag technologies, alongside cysteine-targeting strategies, with a particular focus on enabling robust and scalable high-throughput screening (HTP) workflows. By combining site-specific conjugation with protein engineering, we aim to develop versatile platforms for the rapid generation, characterization, and optimization of novel targeted therapeutic molecules.