An immuno-engineering company providing computational tools and antibody libraries. It has computational platform for analysis and engineering of antibodies, TCRs and peptides and discovery platform of antibody libraries.
Distributed Bio was founded by Jacob Glanville, Giles Day and Chris Smith in 2010. They didn't seek traditional venture capital, but instead built a software platform on Amazon Web Services which allowed people globally to do computational immunology. The company re-incorporated as a California corporation in 2013.
Through the licensing of their software platform, they built cash early to build an antibody discovery and optimization lab. From there Distributed Bio was able to license the data and the ability to engineer new medicines.
Distributed Bio's work on influenza was featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary series "Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak".
AbGenesis was initially built in 2012 and was Distributed Bio's original technology. The AbGenesis repertoire analysis and engineering environment enables analyses of individual cells to millions of B-cell and T-cell receptors, this includes linking of sequence and phenotype data. Users can search sequence data, identify candidate clones, analyze CDR diversity, analyze library selections, analyze hybridoma and immunizationa data, and monitor immune responses.
A Johnson & Johnson JLABS resident, Distributed Bio analyzed thousands of human immune systems with its machine learning platform called AbGenesis to have produced the SuperHuman library with 76 billion antibodies, including over 5,000 hits against each of the 26 targets in immuno-oncology and neurodegeneration within Distributed Bio's pipeline.
Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim have both licensed Distributed Bio's human monoclonal antibody library SuperHuman 2.0. Charles River partnered with Strategic bio to create an end-to-end platform for therapeutic antibody discovery and development.
The SuperHuman library allows for cross-species coverage, developability profiles for thermostability, aggregation potential and immunogenicity. In October of 2019, Distributed Bio announced the release of SuperHuman 3.0, which is a Single Light Chain (SLiC) library.
Distributed Bio's Tungsten 1.0 is a computationally optimized synthetic single domain library based on camelid repertoire. The library includes a camelid framework for reagent development and a human VH3-23 framework for therapeutic development.
Centivax is a universal vaccine technology that has shown promising results in testing against 39 viral strains in influenza including 1918 H1N1 Spanish flu, 1957 H2N2 Asian flu, 1968 H3N2 Hong Kong flu, 1977 H1N1 Russian flu, 2002 H3N2 Fujian flu, and 2009 H1N1 Swine flu.Using Distributed Bio's epitope focusing technology, a Centivax vaccine, is able to focus a subject's immune response against parts of pathogens unable to mutate and induce antibodies directed at those parts. Using pre-2009 viral flu strain information, Centivax was able to neutralize immunity against future pandemic and seasonal viral strains. This is primarily focused on influenza in the animal and human markets, but provides potential for other markets. Distributed Bio is reported to be using this technology to develop a coronavirus vaccine for for the 2019-nCoV outbreak. The coronavirus strain has more recently been renamed SARS-CoV-2 with the disease called COVID-19 (coronavirus disease).
On March 30, 2020, Centivax completed optimization of ultra-potent neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.
Tumbler is Distributed Bio's antibody engineering technology which uses artificial intelligence to generate antibodies in greater quantity and shorter time than traditional methods.
Timeline
Since January 25, 2020, a group of Distributed Bio employees has worked to engineer a treatment for the novel COVID-19 coronavirus.
The company's strategy was to engineer a panel of anti-SARS antibodies to make them recognize and block the novel coronavirus. The result of that work is a panel of ultra-high affinity therapeutic antibodies to neutralize SARS-CoV-2 (the virus behind COVID-19). The work leveraged both the Distributed Bio SuperHuman 2.0 human antibody discovery technology and the Tumbler computational antibody optimization technology to discover thousands of antibodies against a novel virus in 9 weeks.
Charles River Laboratories, Inc. announces that it has entered into an exclusive partnership with Distributed Bio, Inc.
People
Aishani Aatresh
Computational Immunology
Amber Kerawala
Austin Sanchez
Lab Coordinator
David Gangemi
Director of Virology
David Tsao, MSc
Principal Scientist
Dylan Domingo
Research Associate
Emelia Padilla, MSc
Senior Scientist
Jack Wang
Senior Scientist
Founder, Chief Executive Officer and President
Jean-Philippe Buerckert
Director of Computational Immunology
Jordan Seaton, BSc
Business Development Associate
Kathrin Zuberbuhler
Principal Scientist
Kerul Patel, BSc
Kinetics and Biosensor Intern
Michali Izhaky, BSc
Computational Biology Intern
Further reading
Applying computational immunology to antibody discovery
Presentation
June 5, 2012
Call of the wild: A new generation of antibody discovery from human populations
Jacob Glanville, David Louis, David Maurer, Usha Mulvaney, Casey Keyes, Gayathri Shankar, Amy Geurts, Maureen Kagimbi, Distributed Bio
Poster Presentation
Characterizing heritable variation in the antibody repertoire with NGS, 5' RACE and monozygotic twins
Presentation
June 13, 2012
Combining Superhuman-2.0 and Carterra LSA to realize the dream of a one-week antibody discovery cycle
Yasmina Noubia Abdiche, CSO of Carterra
Presentation
Discovering biologics and biomarkers in the antibody repertoire
Presentation
June 12, 2012
High-througput sequencing & antibody library design
Presentation
April 29, 2012
SuperHuman Library 2.0
SuperHuman-2.0: How computational immunoengineering can realize the dream of a one-week antibody discovery cycle
Presentation
The Better Biologic: Algorithms, Repertoire, Sequencing, and Synthetic library design
Presentation
2013