Last month Simone Oostindie and her colleagues published a wonderful paper about Genmab’s HexElect technology in Nature Biotechnology. As Rob de Jong, last author, explains, “HexElect is based on pairs of antibodies that are designed to work together as a team. These teams form only on cell surfaces that express a combination of two different target antigens, and are thought to assemble like the two edges of a zipper. Only on such specific cells, these antibody teams then elicit functional activities that may lead to tumor cell death, or may modulate cell surface receptors regulating cellular activity. By this approach, we aim to improve the safety of potent antibody therapeutics.”
I am really fortunate to get the opportunity to work with this brilliant team of scientists, and assist them whenever possible to visualize their technology and concepts. In collaboration with the authors I developed figure 1 of this paper.