whether antibodies can perform a specific action after reaching the target.
“You want your antibody to do … something functional, in terms of intervening into the disease pathology,” says Mark Kubik, who was until recently Invenra’s vice president of business development. “The way that Invenra goes about doing that is we create assays that allow us to directly interrogate these millions, if not billions, of antibody molecules and ask, ‘Which antibody is going to bind to the [target] in a way that perturbs its function?’”
Kubik made those comments to Xconomy in July, when Invenra raised a $3 million funding round. (He says he has since joined Boulder, CO-based i2 Pharmaceuticals as Chief Business Officer.) Investors have put more than $11 million into Invenra since it was formed in 2011, according to SEC documents.
A majority of the collaborations Invenra has made public to date focus at least in part on developing new cancer therapies, Kaufman says. However, she adds that her company’s technology could also be used to make antibodies for targets known to cause autoimmune disease, infectious disease, and other conditions.
