PDA® Platform
Though each clinical situation is different, all drugs require specificity, affinity, potency, solubility and stability. While proteins provide impressive selectivity for specific drug targets, most proteins have not naturally evolved in ways that would make them appropriate for use as therapeutics. Xencor's Protein Design Automation® (PDA®) platform technology allows us to use naturally occurring proteins as the foundation for development of superior drug candidates that target important human diseases. PDA® technologies, including XmAb® antibody and XPro™ protein therapeutic technologies, enable optimization of a greater range of select protein characteristics than any other approach, allowing us to enhance both the physical and biological properties of drug candidates.
Originally invented at Caltech, Xencor's PDA® technology platform integrates recent advances in experimental molecular biology and protein structural biology by coupling computational amino acid sequence design algorithms with experimental high-throughput screening. PDA® replaces random approaches to protein optimization with a quantitative and systematic structure-based methodology, giving our team of scientists exceptional control of the physical, chemical, and biological properties of proteins. By computationally filtering over 1050 possible sequence variants, we can rapidly access an enormous range of possible solutions and new intellectual property but then focus experimental screening resources on just the few hundred best protein variants. The accuracy of these validated design algorithms in filtering out all but the most likely variants allows the use of complex, expensive and pharmaceutically relevant assays for lead selection; an advantage over random protein optimization approaches.
With PDA®, Xencor has advanced the antibody and protein therapeutics fields beyond protein re-engineering to the design of new protein drug mechanisms and the exploitation of previously untapped biology.