Day One

Wednesday 25th July, 2012

08.00 Registration, Coffee and Networking

08.55 Chair’s Opening Remarks

Greg Landes, Biotechnology Consultant, DNA Bridges

09.00 Monoclonal Antibody Targets - From Yesterday to Tomorrow

• Understanding the development of monoclonal antibodies for immunology targets as well as oncology indications

• What will the future hold? More novel targets? GPCRs? Multi-targeting antibodies?

William Strohl, Vice President, Biologics Research, Johnson & Johnson

Finding The Optimum Antibody Lead

09.30 Strategies to Discover Functional Monoclonal Antibodies against Short Bioactive Peptides

• Antigen design for immunization and screening

• Screening strategy to identify functional antibodies

• Discovering antibodies differentiating short peptides with only one amino acid difference

Han Li, Ph.D.

10.00 A Novel Method for Efficient Mining of the Antibody Repertoire to Discover High Quality Monoclonal Antibodies

• Identification and isolation of antigen-specific B cells from heterogeneous populations

• Generation of high quality therapeutic antibodies and anti-rodent research reagents

Dan Lightwood, Senior Group Leader, Antibody Discovery, UCB

10.30 Speed Networking & Morning Refreshments

12.00 Understanding and applying the flexibility of DVD - Ig format to develop therapeutic DVD-Ig molecules

The impact of variable domain (VD) placement, VD distance and VD - Fc interactions
Targeting 2 epitopes on the same receptor, 2 receptors on the same cell or 2 receptors on 2 different cells

Tariq Ghayur, Senior Research Fellow, Abbott

12.30 Case Study: Advancing Therapeutic Antibody Discovery using VelociGene and VelocImmune

• Targeted replacement of specific mouse immune repertories with corresponding human segments

• VelociMab allows rapid isolation of high affinity human antibodies with desired functional properties

David Buckler, Associate Director, Therapeutic Proteins, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals

1.00 Case Study: Designing a Universal Combinatorial Antibody Framework - A Bioinformatics Approach

• Building a universal consensus of framework positions critical for the preservation of the functional conformation of the complementarity determining region of antibodies

Jaafar Haidar, Senior Scientist, Antibody Technology, ImClone Systems

1.30 Lunch

2.30 Discovery of Potent, Low Immunogenicity Adnectins

• Use of a proprietary selection technology, PROfusion, to discover and optimize lead Adnectin candidates

• Downstream tools used to assess developability of lead candidates

• In silico prediction of Adnectin immunogenicity and approaches to reduce or eliminate it

Ray Camphausen, Associate Vice President, Adnexus Therapeutics

3.00 Is Phage Display the Best Option?

• Discussing the limitations of current phage display technologies against mammalian cell displays

• Pros and cons of yeast display, bacterial display, ribosome display, and mRNA display

Jaafar Haidar, ImClone Systems; William Finlay, Pfizer; Sean McKenna, EMD Serono

Discovering Differentiated Antibodies

3.30 Overcoming the Challenges Associated with a Highly Conserved Target

• Developing anti-Mullerian inhibiting substance type II receptor antibody-based therapeutics for ovarian cancer

• Designing antibodies by rational design strategies modeling the ligand/receptor interaction

• Exploring immunoconjugates for the delivery of cytotoxic agents to cells expressing MISIIR

Gregory Adams, Co-Leader, Developmental Therapeutics Program, Fox Chase Cancer Center

4.00 Afternoon Refreshments

4.30 Insights into Tumor Microenvironment Biology can Influence Antibody Engineering

• A comprehensive introduction to tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs)

• Looking into the pro-tumor aspects of TAMs

• Exploring the therapeutic benefit of re-directing TAM function with monoclonal antibodies

Randall Brezski, Research Scientist, Fc Engineering, Janssen

5.00 Right Epitope: Right Drug

• Exploring the advantages of driving antibody selection towards desired epitopes via in vitro systems

• Understanding the ability to screen antibody panels in high throughput from any platform for the desired function

Tristan Vaughan, Senior Director Lead Generation, MedImmune

5.30 The Gut-Selective Anti-Inflammatory Biologic Vedolizumab

• Using selecting targeting to eliminate the adverse events associated with modulating a pleiotropic target

• Understanding the utility of the a4b1 and a4b7 integrin antagonist natalizumab in multiple sclerosis

Eric Fedyk, Head, Nonclinical Inflammation, Millennium Pharmaceuticals