BIO Asia 2024 – Taiwan: Highlights and Event Recap

BIO Asia 2024 was held in Taiwan on 24-28 July, 2024. The event brought together bioindustry leaders from North America, Europe and Asia to explore business opportunities and to engage with Taiwan's emerging biotech sector. This year’s theme, Global View, Asian Touch, showcased the opportunities that exist within Asian’s fast-moving economies, its dynamic and innovation-generating biomedical ecosystems, and its globally-connected bioindustry production and value chains.

Topics discussed in their Innovation Forum included: 

• New therapeutic modalities 

• Innovative platform & tools 

• Precision medicine & health 

• AI for Pharma 

• Digital health 

→ Biointron’s Highlighted Points: 

1. ADC Drug Development and Manufacturing Trends Challenges and Solutions 

• The Nab2-ADC (Nano Antibody Bifunctional Biparatopic Antibody Drug Conjugate) has a nanobody-based design and smaller molecular weight, addressing critical limitations of current ADCs, including the risk of interstitial lung disease (ILD), suboptimal targeting efficiency, slow tumor penetration, and off-target toxicity. 

• Strategies for widening the therapeutic window of the ADC include internalization mechanisms. 

• Development of effective ADCs with broad therapeutic window remains challenging due to the complexity of conjugation technologies and the instability of the linkers. Considerations from CMC/manufacturing, preclinical, and clinical will be interwoven with relevant guidance from major health authorities. Dosing optimization strategy, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics assessment, clinical trial designs, etc., are needed for Biologics License Applications. 

2. New therapeutic modalities 

• With advances in genomics and other various ‘omics’ technologies, it has become possible to continuously capture changes in immune cells in various pathological conditions and drug responses/adverse reactions. The immune responses activated through drug and HLA interaction have been shown to play key roles in drug-induced skin hypersensitivity and hepatotoxicity. 

• Characterization of the systemic and tumor immune environment including T cell and B cell repertoires by next-generation sequencers may improve the clinical outcome of immunotherapy including development of TCR-engineered T cell therapy. 

• Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) strategies can improve success in drug development, in the emerging and transformative modality of messenger RNA-lipid nanoparticles (mRNA-LNP). With the advent of personalized vaccines, chain of interest (CoI) and chain of custody (CoC) becomes critical in a successful CMC strategy. 

3. Translational Medicine  

• Protein kinases have become one of the pharmaceutical industry’s most important class of drug targets. Understanding the disease-driven protein conformation is essential for the design of ligand efficient, highly selective kinase inhibitors with preferred drug-like properties. In addition, kinase conformational change after the development of treatment resistance plays a crucial role for the design of the next generation kinase inhibitors overcoming treatment resistance. 

• Aberrant activity of c-Met can cause abnormal signaling in cells, leading to tumor growth, migration, invasion, and metastasis. Bozitinib is an oral and highly selective Type I c-Met inhibitor and is a safe and effective treatment for patients of NSCLC or GBM with alterations in c-Met function. 

4. AI for Pharma 

• Deep learning methodologies and industry collaboration can improve the analytical and predictive power of AI in drug discovery. It can extract valuable insights from complex data sets, which can be used to accelerate the drug discovery process. These technologies are being used to drive innovation and improve outcomes for patients. 

• Enhancing drug discovery with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) & artificial intelligence, cheminformatics, and computer-aided drug design approaches can advance and speed up drug discovery. 

• Integrating artificial intelligence in the design and discovery of novel protein degraders holds transformative potential from oncology to neurodegenerative disorders.  

• Using AI in clinical development programs can help discover novel factors or correlation to impact overall clinical process before trials’ initiation, or help find the right target population with high risks or severe safety issues before clinical operation. This helps reduce the possibility of protocol amendments which is one of factors to delay clinical operation and can boost patient engagement including patient retention during operation. 

• Envisagenics’ SpliceCore is an AI-powered target discovery platform with a focus on the identification of novel, highly tumor-specific, and safe epitopes for immunotherapeutic development. 

Thank you for visiting us at our booth in BIO Asia 2024 to learn about our services! We had a great time connecting with you and understanding how we can help you achieve antibody development. Our expert team would be happy to answer any follow-up questions. Feel free to email us at info@biointron.com or visit our website at www.biointron.com.