The 22nd Annual Antibody Engineering and 9th Annual Antibody Therapeutics international conferences, and the 2011 Annual Meeting of The Antibody Society, organized by IBC Life Sciences with contributions from The Antibody Society and two Scientific Advisory Boards, were held December 5-8, 2011 in San Diego, CA. The meeting drew ~800 participants who attended sessions on a wide variety of topics relevant to antibody research and development. As a preview to the main events, a pre-conference workshop held on December 4, 2011 focused on antibodies as probes of structure. The Antibody Engineering Conference comprised eight sessions: (1) structure and dynamics of antibodies and their membrane receptor targets; (2) model-guided generation of binding sites; (3) novel selection strategies; (4) antibodies in a complex environment: targeting intracellular and misfolded proteins; (5) rational vaccine design; (6) viral retargeting with engineered binding molecules; (7) the biology behind potential blockbuster antibodies and (8) antibodies as signaling modifiers: where did we go right, and can we learn from success? The Antibody Therapeutics session comprised five sessions: (1)Twenty-five years of therapeutic antibodies: lessons learned and future challenges; (2) preclinical and early stage development of antibody therapeutics; (3) next generation anti-angiogenics; (4) updates of clinical stage antibody therapeutics and (5) antibody drug conjugates and bispecific antibodies.
Keywords: antibody engineering; antibody therapeutics; antibody-antigen structure; antibody-drug conjugates; bispecific antibodies; computational design; vaccine design.