Bengaluru start-up explores a sustainable drug discovery model for cancer treatment Premium

Bengaluru startup immunitoAI is building an AI platform to make antibody-based drug discovery faster & more efficient.

Antibody therapy for cancer treatment, a more precise and lesser harmful alternative to chemotherapy, has been around for many years now. However, for the common person, it has remained prohibitively expensive costing around ₹4 to 5 Crore. Bengaluru-based startup immunitoAI may have a solution for this.

Founded by Dr. Aridni Shah and Trisha Chatterjee, immunitoAI is building an AI platform for antibody-based drug discovery which makes designing and developing antibody drugs faster and more efficient.

As per reports the market size of antibody therapy is as huge as $186 billion (as of 2021) and is expected to witness a CAGR of 13.2 percent from 2022 to 2028. A relatively new market, Dr. Shah points out that today of the top 10 best sellers in medication, five are antibodies.

Chemotherapy drugs which are small molecule drugs, kill any fast-growing cell, and cannot differentiate between a healthy cell and a cancerous cell. As a result, they harm every fast-growing cell in the body including the hair and the red blood cells.

On the other hand, antibodies bind to a specific target. Making use of this property, pharma companies have been designing antibody-based drugs that can bind to cancer cells. These antibodies would activate the immune system which would attack only the cancer cell.

“Since it is a biological molecule, so far companies have relied on biological sources like animals to get these antibodies,” Ms. Shah explains.

“For example, there are certain proteins specifically present only on cancer surfaces. You can take just that protein and inject it into an animal. For the animal, it’s a foreign body. So, its immune system starts producing antibodies over a course of three months to a year.”