Main Conference Day 2Tuesday, 15 December 2026 - PT (Pacific Time, GMT-08:00)

HCAb Harbour Mice® is the world’s first fully human heavy-chain-only immunoglobulin transgenic mouse platform. This presentation will highlight integrated antibody discovery and screening capabilities, including high-throughput and AI-powered screening approaches, enabling the efficient identification and optimization of next-generation therapeutic antibodies against complex and challenging targets.

Antibody discovery driven by AI generates thousands of candidates, but validation via mammalian expression remains slow. We present an engineered cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) workflow that inserts a rapid triage step before scale-up. By delivering decision-grade kinetics directly from cell-free material, this platform enables confident early go/no-go decisions and protects downstream capacity—the missing upstream triage step in modern antibody hit validation.

Traditional antibody optimization pipelines optimize affinity and other engineering objectives in separate, iterative campaigns that are inherently slow, recursive, and unpredictable. We present a differentiated optimization framework: millions of quantitative protein affinity measurements power an AI model that accurately and rapidly predicts the affinity of candidates >20 mutations away from a parental antibody. By efficiently exploring vast regions of sequence space, our approach enables simultaneous optimization across multiple design objectives. This includes the generation of novel binders that secure freedom to operate, engineering pH-sensitive binding and species cross-reactivity, and the creation of defined affinity ladders for lead ranking. Our results highlight an integrated wet-lab/dry-lab platform for multi-objective engineering that accelerates therapeutic antibody discovery and optimization.