pharm edaily

[Song Young-doo, Edaily Reporter] Syntekabio, an AI-powered drug discovery company, announced on the 9th that it will participate in the 21st Protein & Antibody Engineering Summit(PEGS Boston) held in Boston, U.S., from May 12 to 16(local time). The company will unveil its AI platforms for antibody optimization and neoantigen discovery for cancer vaccines.

Hosted annually by the Cambridge Healthtech Institute, PEGS Boston is a leading global conference in the pharmaceutical and biotech sector, particularly renowned in protein engineering and antibody development. This marks Syntekabio’s second consecutive year attending the event.

This year’s summit features nine thematic tracks, Engineering, Oncology, Multispecifics, Immunotherapy, Expression, Analytics, Immunogenicity, Emerging Therapeutics, and Machine Learning. Notably, “Machine Learning” has been added as a new track for the first time, reflecting its growing importance in biologics development.

Syntekabio plans to showcase its AI platforms for antibody therapeutics(Ab-ARS) and cancer vaccines(NEO-ARS) at its booth, and pursue global collaboration opportunities through multiple partnering meetings.

Following its recent co-launch with U.S. based antibody validation company OCMS Bio of an “ultra-fast antibody discovery and one-shot validation service” Syntekabio will engage in joint business development(BD) activities at the conference.

The service generates approximately 50,000 antibody variants using Syntekabio’s Ab-ARS platform. OCMS Bio then expresses these variants in cells, captures them, and functionally verifies antigen binding. Next-generation sequencing(NGS) is used to identify promising antibodies.

This end-to-end workflow from candidate generation and binding prediction to developability evaluation operates on a single platform. It significantly reduces the time and cost required to obtain early-stage antibody drug candidates.

Ab-ARS is an AI platform that optimizes sequences in antibody-antigen binding regions(complementarity-determining regions, or CDR). Built on a proprietary peptide-peptide interaction database derived from Syntekabio’s internal 3D protein data bank(PDB), it includes CDR sequence optimization for enhanced binding, along with developability and humanization assessments.

NEO-ARS is an AI solution for predicting optimal cancer neoantigens for vaccine development. It can identify both patient-specific and shared neoantigens applicable to broader patient groups. In March, Syntekabio entered a joint research agreement with European cancer vaccine developer PDC line Pharma to further expand real-world applications of this technology.

On the morning of May 12, Dr. Alexandre of Syntekabio’s U.S. subsidiary will give a presentation titled, “Structure-Based AI Platforms for Neoantigen and Antibody Discovery, and Design of Bispecific T-cell Engagers: Ab-ARS and NEO-ARS.”

The presentation will propose a new strategy that goes beyond conventional antibody therapeutics targeting cell surface antigens. It will highlight the capability of NEO-ARS to predict immunogenic peptides and target intracellular tumor antigens. This approach enables the design of bispecific fusion proteins that combine T-cell receptors(TCRs) with antibodies, targeting both tumor derived peptides presented via HLA and T-cell surface proteins. A key innovation is the expansion of targetable antigens from “cell surface proteins” to “intracellular proteins.”

Jong-Sun Jung, CEO of Syntekabio, commented, “We are excited to introduce our AI technologies applicable to antibody drugs and therapeutic cancer vaccines at PEGS Boston 2025. Through collaborations with diverse biotech companies, we have validated our capabilities and now look forward to extending our platform to broader biologics modalities.”