Our Company
Headquartered in San Carlos (California, United States), GigaGen, a subsidiary of Grifols, is advancing transformative antibody drugs for immune deficiency, infectious diseases and checkpoint resistant cancers by leveraging industry-leading, single-cell technologies.
GigaGen’s novel technology platforms uniquely capture and recreate complete immune repertoires as functional antibody libraries. This approach has enabled the creation of first-in-class recombinant polyclonal antibody therapies for the treatment of infectious diseases.
GigaGen’s lead oncology asset, GIGA-564, is an anti-CTLA-4 monoclonal antibody that has demonstrated improved anti-tumor efficacy in vivo through a unique mechanism of action.
GigaGen is leveraging its proprietary technology platforms for the continued discovery of novel recombinant polyclonal drugs and monoclonal antibodies to treat life-threatening diseases.
Team
News
Press Releases
In the News
Targeted Oncology: Novel CTLA-4 Agents Build on Immunotherapy Foundation, Aim to Improve Efficacy/Safety
BioSpace: An In-Depth Look at Innovation on Cancer Research Day
GEN: Drug Targets Identified More Discerningly
Biocentury: GigaGen aims to overcome supply limits, boost potency with recombinant convalescent sera substitute
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Our Science
Everyone is made up of trillions of single cells, which all have unique properties.
Understanding this extraordinary diversity would help to better understand disease and develop effective drugs. However, conventional research methods and technologies have only scratched the surface of this complexity.
GigaGen’s platform technologies significantly increase the productivity and speed of target and drug discovery, quickly filling a growing pipeline of transformative antibody drugs.
The Surge Platform: Transformative Drugs, Faster
Surge captures and recreates complete antibody repertoires as recombinant antibody libraries, encompassing nearly 100% of the diversity within natural antibody libraries. Surge is a unique combination of single-cell emulsion droplet microfluidics technology, genomics, and protein library engineering. This technology enables production of recombinant polyclonals derived from mammalian repertoires. Surge also replaces conventional drug discovery technologies such as hybridomas and phage display, enabling a wide spectrum of drug candidates, including rare antibodies with potentially unique profiles.
Surge is recognized by patents issued in the U.S. and Europe, as well as 16 grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
The Magnify Platform: Discovering Novel Oncology Targets
With Magnify, we profile tens of thousands of individual cells from tumor responders and non-responders, enabling identification of rare novel targets within the complex tumor microenvironment.
Magnify integrates patented, single-cell emulsion droplet microfluidics technology, massively parallel RNA sequencing and machine learning to identify genes that are associated with response or non-response. Drug targets discovered with Magnify are then fed into GigaGen’s Surge platform for the discovery of lead antibodies that target them.
Pipeline
GigaGen is using novel single-cell technologies to discover and develop antibody therapies to treat life-threatening diseases.
Modulating the Tumor Microenvironment
Antibodies and Bi-functional Molecules with Differentiated Anti-tumor Mechanisms
Immuno-oncology is a rapidly growing field of cancer treatment based on understanding the body’s immune response to cancer. This knowledge has produced highly effective monoclonal antibody cancer drugs, such as nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy).
GigaGen has used its single-cell technologies to better understand immune response to tumors. Based on this research, GigaGen has selected the most promising targets for modulating the tumor microenvironment. For each target, we have identified novel clinical candidates with validated activity in mouse models.
Our leading programs focus on two clinically validated targets, CTLA-4 and PD-L1. Our antibody drug candidates present unique profiles and have the potential to translate into more effective therapies with reduced toxicity.
- Anti-CTLA-4: GIGA-564
An anti-CTLA-4 antibody that specifically depletes regulatory T cells in the tumor microenvironment, but does not block binding of CTLA-4 to B7 ligands, potentially providing superior efficacy and reduced toxicity.
- Bi-specific anti-PD-L1 x Anti-TGF-β
A bi-specific anti-PD-L1 x Anti-TGF-β antibody that activates immune cells and enhances immune cell infiltration into the tumor microenvironment, potentially providing a durable response in late stage cancer.
Recombinant Polyclonal Drugs
The World’s First Recombinant Polyclonal Drugs
We are advancing the first recombinant polyclonal antibody therapies for the treatment of infectious disease and transplant rejection, disorders that are currently treated with polyclonals derived from human or animal plasma. Polyclonal therapies are ideal for diseases that comprise many targets, for example, viruses that are best neutralized by a drug that binds multiple epitopes. Our candidates are engineered to be more potent, and therefore potentially more efficacious, than plasma-derived products. In addition, our candidates overcome the limitations inherent to existing products, which are subject to plasma supply shortages, variability from batch-to-batch, and risk for contamination from unwanted artifacts such as clotting factors.
- Recombinant IVIg:
Immune deficiencies are characterized by the body’s inability to properly make antibodies. Since antibodies are required to fight infection, patients with immune deficiencies are susceptible to recurrent and severe infections caused by viruses and bacteria that healthy people naturally fight off. Patients with immune deficiency are treated with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg), an antibody product derived from the plasma of thousands of human donors.
GigaGen’s recombinant IVIg replicates the antibody diversity of healthy vaccinated donors against selected common diseases. It is made by capturing millions-diverse DNA libraries from B cell repertoires from healthy, vaccinated human donors. These libraries are engineered into mammalian cells to re-create recombinant polyclonal antibody protein products. We have validated the purified, massively polyclonal protein products with in vitro and mouse models.
GigaGen’s recombinant IVIg has less risk of contamination, is not subject to plasma supply shortages, and is highly consistent from batch-to-batch. In addition, recombinant IVIg is engineered for higher potency than plasma-derived products.
- Recombinant Human ATG:
During kidney transplant anti-thymocyte globulin (ATG) is used with other medications to prevent and treat transplant rejection. ATG is a plasma-based polyclonal typically derived from rabbit plasma, and therefore composed of rabbit antibodies.
We are developing a recombinant human ATG for kidney transplant rejection as an alternative to rabbit plasma derived ATG. Our recombinant product is more consistent from batch-to-batch, contains human antibodies and therefore is less immunogenic than rabbit ATG, and has the potential to provide improved efficacy with a less frequent dosing regimen.
Publications, Scientific Posters & Presentations
Publications
BioRxiv: Lack of blocking activity in anti-CTLA-4 antibodies reduces toxicity, but not anti-tumor efficacy
BMC Biology: Single-cell transcriptomics reveals the effect of PD-L1/TGF-β blockade on the tumor microenvironment
Nature Biotechnology: Generation of recombinant hyperimmune globulins from diverse B-cell repertoires
Antibodies: Preferential Identification of Agonistic OX40 Antibodies by Using Cell Lysate to Pan Natively Paired, Humanized Mouse-Derived Yeast Surface Display Libraries
Posters & Presentations
GIGA-564, a third generation anti-CTLA-4 with minimal ability to block CTLA-4 binding to B7 ligands, has enhanced efficacy but reduced toxicity compared to ipilumumab in pre-clinical models
Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC)
Boston, Massachusetts
November 10, 2022
A recombinant, fully human ATG polyclonal antibody drug drives immune cell depletion in a model of graft-versus-host disease
International Transplantation Science Meeting
Clearwater, Florida
November 12, 2019
Accelerating Cancer Drug R&D Through Single Cell ‘Omics
Oncology Strategy Meeting West Coast USA
San Francisco, California
May 20, 2019
Recombinant Hyperimmunes for Infectious Disease
10th Annual PEGS Summit Europe
Lisbon, Portugal
November 13, 2018
Building a Deep Immuno-Oncology Portfolio in Less Than a Year
14th Annual PEGS Summit
Boston, Massachusetts
May 2, 2018
Rapid Discovery of High-Affinity, Human Antibodies Against 17 Immuno-Oncology Targets Using Molecular Genomic Screening Methods
Keystone Symposia conference
Whistler, British Columbia
Feb. 26, 2018