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Quick Rewind: Key Takeaways from PEGS Boston 2024
Fresh off our appearance at this year’s Festival of Biologics (FOB), Antibody Solutions took our show on the road to the recent 2024 Protein Engineering Summit (PEGS) in Boston, Massachusetts.
For two decades, PEGS has been an essential destination for anyone looking to gain fresh insights and make new connections in the biologics field. Each year, more than 2,400 attendees – including 350+ presenters – gather (this year at the Omni Boston Hotel) for four days of panels, presentations, seminars, and networking opportunities. And everyone gets to party a little bit, too, especially since PEGS was celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year.
Antibody Solutions, all set up and ready for business at booth #105.
Both booth visits and scientific talks were plentiful this year. We met quite a few new faces and greeted old friends at our booth, and we enjoyed the various exhibit hall receptions celebrating PEGS’ anniversary. Talks this year included most of the traditional topics that you’d naturally expect (examples: overcoming developability hurdles, target-specific discovery findings, and production scalability), but there were some new tracks as well, including one devoted to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) in biotechnology. Like the experience we had at FOB, the buzz around AI/ML consisted of a lot of excitement and enthusiasm . . . tempered with managed expectations. Everyone generally agrees that AI/ML are promising tools that have the potential to greatly enhance the antibody discovery process, but they won’t be replacing in vivo discovery any time soon. Still, it’ll be fascinating to see how the AI/ML track evolves and expands at PEGS in the years ahead.
On Wednesday, May 15th, I had the privilege of presenting the talk “Leveraging Multiple Discovery Pathways to Improve the Efficiency of Therapeutic Candidate Generation” as part of the Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s Engineering Antibodies track. Springboarding from last year’s talk, which served as a comprehensive introduction to our discovery platform Cellestive, I used this talk as an opportunity to illustrate our platform’s effectiveness for generating strong, actionable project data.
Dr. Kenney presents “Leveraging Multiple Discovery Pathways to Improve the Efficiency of Therapeutic Candidate Generation,” part of the track Engineering Antibodies at PEGS Boston 2024.
Those same threads, we discovered, were picked up by visitors to our booth. Many were eager to discuss single B-cell based discovery options and to to consider how the potential of human-antibody producing transgenic animals could be fully harnessed in their drug discovery programs. In addition, a large number of attendees noted the continued reliability of in vivo discovery over both display and AI research models. While they remain interesting discovery options, it was encouraging to have the backbone of our current discovery work reaffirmed by PEGS attendees.
If you were unable to connect with us at this year’s Summit, it’s still not too late to reach out to learn more about the original research we presented. Drop us a line and let’s discuss your current antibody discovery challenges, and reveal together how our team at Antibody Solutions might be able to help you overcome them.
