Rapid adoption of Carterra’s LSA instrument drives European expansion

Company's antibody screening platform minimizes the risk of missing a blockbuster.

The Munich CEC will be a place for researchers throughout Europe to gain first-hand experience with Carterra’s game-changing antibody screening platform, the LSA, through demonstrations and workshops. Carterra will also offer basic courses in label-free biosensor operation, experimental design, and data analysis. Since its launch in 2018, the LSA is installed on three continents and in a majority of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. To support this exponential worldwide growth, Carterra has hired direct sales, support, and service personnel in Europe, most of whom are based in the Munich office.

Traditional antibody discovery requires a primary screen of ever-expanding antibody libraries by low-resolution “yes/no” assays to identify binders. Only a small group of candidate antibodies are then characterized on traditional, low-throughput biosensor tools, which provide real-time readout of the full binding profile. This workflow runs the risk that potential blockbuster drug candidates could be missed.

Carterra’s LSA is turning that model on its head by enabling the high-resolution analysis of entire libraries, combining screening and characterization into one seamless step, thereby minimizing the risk of missing a blockbuster. The LSA’s dramatic throughput condenses months of work into days.

Additionally, the LSA offers investigators the most resolved view of the epitope – the location an antibody binds to its target. An epitope is an innate property that cannot be changed and must be discovered empirically. The LSA is the only technology that enables characterization of epitope binding at the full library level. This provides biologics developers an enormous advantage in differentiating their biomolecules from competitors’ drugs and in establishing intellectual property claims.

“The LSA is changing the way biologics are discovered,” says Tim Germann, Carterra’s Chief Commercial Officer. “We’re thrilled to invite European drug developers and the research community at large to experience in person the massive throughput and minuscule sample requirements that the LSA enables. We’re making the traditional discovery processes up to 100 times faster while using only 1% of the normal sample input-it’s the definition of disruptive.”