Building on safe ground

Since the advent of technologies to generate antibodies in the lab in 1975, a great many companies have been founded on the premise that these platforms could easily be used to crank out treatments for a huge variety of diseases. But while the technologies to generate antibodies have become more and more sophisticated, moving from mouse to humanized to human to engineered, the road to drug development has been far bumpier. Indeed, the majority of successful MAbs have not come from the platform companies.

The lesson of this experience is that the biology matters, and the initial failures could be laid to poor choices of targets...