GigaGen Announces Successful Completion of Technical Goals on Four NIH Grant Projects
South San Francisco (PRWEB) March 08, 2016 -- GigaGen Inc., a world leader in massively high-throughput immune repertoire single-cell sequencing and protein expression, today announced that it has achieved all of the technical goals for four Phase I grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Phase I grants were awarded through the NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program in 2015 from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The NIH SBIR program is highly competitive, with <15% of applications receiving funding in most years.
The four SBIR projects pertain to different applications of GigaGen’s drug discovery platform. One grant, from NIAID, supports innovations in GigaGen’s T cell repertoire platform that pairs clonotype and phenotype of millions of T cell receptors (TCRs) in blood or tumor samples. Two other grants, also from NIAID, support GigaGen’s recombinant intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) development program to produce and characterize high powered “hyperimmunes” to fight pneumococcal and other infections. The fourth grant, from NCI, supported enhancements to GigaGen's platform that increased the processing speed up to three million cells per hour. As part of the NCI project, GigaGen discovered antibody drug candidates as rare as <0.001% prevalence in pancreatic cancer patient immune repertoires.
As part of these projects, GigaGen has built the world’s first-ever millions-diverse, natively paired TCR and antibody libraries from sixty blood donors. Whereas other technologies such as those from Juno, HiFiBio, and Atreca use nucleic acid barcoding approaches to computationally pair TCR or antibody subunits, GigaGen physically links complete protein coding sequences for massively parallel protein expression.
“We are pleased to have achieved all of our technical milestones before the end of the Phase I grant periods. The support of NCI and NIAID acknowledges the innovation of our drug discovery platform and how it can be broadly applied across different disease states including oncology and immune deficiency,” said Dave Johnson, Ph.D., CEO of GigaGen. “Our unique and powerful technology for mining entire immune repertoires from animals or patients of interest is already yielding candidates for powerful new antibody, T cell, and CAR-T therapies and targets.”
Based on successful completion of the Phase I grants, GigaGen has submitted four new follow-on Phase II NIH grant applications.
About GigaGen
GigaGen is a biopharmaceutical company developing novel antibody and T cell therapies derived from immune repertoires. GigaGen’s technology platform captures the genetic make-up of the entire human immune repertoire, capturing and genetically analyzing B and T cells at a rate of millions per hour, while simultaneously identifying their antigen and protein binders. Therapies derived from natural immune repertoires mimic the body's natural immune system - they can be more effective, can have fewer side effects, and can have faster development timelines than those developed from traditional methods. GigaGen has drug discovery projects with several pharmaceutical companies in addition to its own pipeline for development of the first recombinant intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) and immuno-oncology therapies. For more information visit http://www.gigagen.com.
Jennifer Keller, GigaGen, Inc., +1 650 799 1570, [email protected]
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