Salt Lake City — Carterra said a new Leerink Partners report has identified its high-throughput surface plasmon resonance platforms as a key enabling technology in the growing market for artificial intelligence-driven antibody discovery.
The July 16 report, titled “Lab-in-the-Loop: AI Rewires Antibody Discovery, Unlocking a $7B LST Opportunity,” estimates that AI-enabled antibody discovery could generate about $7 billion in demand for life science tools.
That total includes an estimated $4 billion biologics drug discovery market, of which roughly $1.3 billion is currently outsourced to service providers.
The report describes the emerging “Lab-in-the-Loop” model as a process in which AI systems generate potential antibody sequences, laboratory experiments test those candidates and the resulting data are fed back into the models to improve subsequent rounds of design.
Leerink said the approach is likely to increase demand for laboratory-generated data rather than reduce it. The report identified antibody binding-affinity measurement as a central part of the process and listed Carterra among the primary providers of the technology needed to generate those measurements.
Carterra develops high-throughput surface plasmon resonance, or HT-SPR, platforms used to measure how strongly antibodies and other molecules bind to their targets.
“This report reinforces what we’re hearing directly from our customers: as AI generates larger and more complex sets of antibody candidates, the bottleneck shifts to how quickly and accurately those candidates can be validated at the bench,” said Josh Eckman, CEO and Co-Founder of Carterra. “Carterra’s high-throughput SPR platforms were built for exactly this kind of scale, and we believe we’re well positioned to benefit as Lab-in-the-Loop becomes the default way biologics programs are run.”
The report named 10 Carterra customers, including Twist Bioscience and Adaptyv Bio, as participants in the expanding AI-driven biologics discovery market.
At the Protein and Antibody Engineering Summit in Boston in May, Twist Biopharma Solutions Chief Scientific Officer Colby Souders, Ph.D., discussed the use of Carterra platforms in the company’s work with AWS Biodiscovery to generate large-scale antibody binding data for AI-guided research programs.
Adaptyv Bio CEO and Co-Founder Julian Englert said demand for protein synthesis and high-throughput testing had increased as AI-based drug discovery programs expanded.
“The market opportunity may be understated. AI in drug discovery is here to stay and we believe Leerink’s estimate of a ~$4B antibody discovery market may be low,” Englert said. “At Adaptyv, we are seeing massive increases in both orders for our protein synthesis but also the size of projects being requested. We have deployed the most sophisticated and high-throughput technologies, like Carterra platforms, to maintain our leadership in the space.”
Carterra said AI models require large volumes of accurate experimental data to identify promising drug candidates. As the number of computer-generated antibody candidates grows, traditional low-throughput and basic screening methods may be unable to process them quickly enough.
The company’s platforms combine proprietary microfluidics with real-time HT-SPR and can deliver as much as 100 times the throughput of traditional label-free systems while using less sample material.
Carterra has developed label-free biosensor technology for more than 20 years. Its systems are used by many of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies for biologic and small-molecule research.
