Beyond Borders: Advancements in Antibody-Based Therapeutics in Uncharted Territories

Gordon Freeman

Keynote lecture: Cancer Immunotherapy

Dr. Gordon Freeman, Ph.D. is in the Department of Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Freeman earned his BA in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University.
Dr. Freeman’s research identified the major pathways that control the immune response by inhibiting T cell activation (PD-L1/PD-1 and B7-2/CTLA-4) or stimulating T cell activation (B7-2/CD28). In 2000, Dr. Freeman discovered PD-L1 and PD-L2, and showed they were ligands for PD-1, thus defining the PD-1 pathway and the drug target: block the interaction. He showed the function of PD-1 was to inhibit immune responses and that blockade enhanced immune responses. He showed that PD-L1 is highly
expressed on many solid tumors such as breast and lung, as well as some hematologic malignancies and allows these tumors to inhibit immune attack. This work provided the critical translational insights for development of a successful strategy for cancer immunotherapy - blocking the PD-1-ligand interaction.
Dr. Freeman has published over 400 scientific papers and holds over 90 US patents on immunotherapies. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a Fellow of the AACR and SITC Academies. He has received numerous awards including the 2014 William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology, 2017 Warren Alpert Foundation award, the 2020 Richard Smalley, MD, memorial award, and the AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology for his work that led to development of PD-L1/PD-1 pathway blockade for cancer immunotherapy.

Mitchell Ho

Generation of Camel and Shark Nanobodies Neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 and Lassa Virus

Closing Remarks

Dr. Mitchell Ho is a Senior Investigator, Deputy Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Director of the Antibody Engineering Program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is the Chair of the Department of Biochemistry for the FAES Graduate School at the NIH. He also serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Antibody Therapeutics (Oxford University Press). Dr. Ho’s research has been focused on the development of new therapeutic paradigms for several difficult to treat cancers including liver cancer, rare cancers such as mesothelioma, and childhood cancers such as neuroblastoma. A major focus of Dr. Ho’s research is on the structure and function of glypicans (e.g., GPC3, GPC2) and establishing them as new cancer-specific targets. This area of research ranges from investigation of the mechanisms by which glypicans regulate Wnt, Yap and other signaling pathways to the development of new antibody engineering technologies that lead to effective cancer therapeutics. In line with the antibody technology development, his lab has constructed shark and camel singledomain antibody phage libraries for therapeutic antibody discovery. Some of his laboratory
research has direct clinical application. Clinical trials using the CAR-T cells created in his lab are ongoing for treating liver cancer and other cancers.
Dr. Ho received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Ira Pastan at the NIH/NCI. He was elected to the Board of Directors for the Antibody Society, the Board of Directors for the Chinese Antibody Society, and the Board of Directors for the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences (FAES). He received Asian & Pacific Islander American Organization (APAO) Scientific Achievement Award, NIH Deputy Director for Intramural Research (DDIR) Innovation Award, NIH Merit Award, NCI Director's Award and NCI Director’s Innovation Award.

Zhiqiang An

Developing Antibodies Targeting LILRB2/TREM2 in Alzheimer’s Disease

Dr. Zhiqiang An is Professor and the Robert A. Welch Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry, Director of the Texas Therapeutics Institute, and Vice President of Drug Discovery at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. His laboratory focuses on antibody drug discovery. During the last 10 years, he has advanced more than 10 innovative antibody-based therapies to preclinical and clinical development for diseases ranging from acute myeloid leukemia, cancer bone metastasis, solid tumor, spinal cord injury, and COVID-19. Previously, he served as Chief scientific Officer at Epitomics, Inc. and was Director of Biologics Research at Merck. Dr. An is an elected fellow He is a fellow of the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (SIMB), the American Academy of Microbiology (ASM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He is the recipient of the 2024 Scientific Achievement Award in Drug Discovery and
Development given by the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET). Dr. An received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Kentucky and his postdoctoral training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Shan Lu

Isolation of Functional mAbs from People Receiving Experimental Vaccines Progress and Outlook

Dr. Shan Lu is a professor emeritus and founding Director, Laboratory of Nucleic Acid Vaccines, at University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School (UMCMS), USA. Dr. Lu was one of pioneers in Nucleic Acid Vaccines in early 1990s and advocated the further advancement of this field in the last 3 decades. He promoted the Heterologous Prime-Boost Vaccination concept and developed the world’s first polyvalent DNA/protein HIV vaccine into human clinical studies which showed robust and broadly cross-reactive immune responses. Dr. Lu is a US board certified physician with 20 years clinical practice experience and guided the development of medicine clinical research program at UMCMS as executive director. He is also a co-founder of Worcester HIV Vaccine (WHV), a biotech dedicated to the development of HIV vaccines.Dr. Lu is Editor-in-Chief for Emerging Microbes and Infections (EMI), and has served as editorial board members for Journal of Virology, Current Opinion of Virology, Vaccine, NPj Vaccine, and Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics. Dr. Lu is a member of Board of the International Society for Vaccines (ISV) and served as ISV president (2011-2013) and Chair of Board (2022). He is a Fellow of ISV and a Fellow of ACP (American College of Physicians).

Janice Reichert

Quantifying the Success of Antibody Therapeutics

Dr. Janice M. Reichert, Ph.D., is Chief Operating Officer of The Antibody Society, a nonprofit trade association that serves individuals and organizations involved in antibody research and development. She is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of mAbs, a peerreviewed, PubMed-indexed biomedical journal that focuses on topics relevant to antibody R&D. She has published extensively on development trends for antibody therapeutics and presented her research results as an invited speaker at conferences held worldwide.
Dr. Reichert received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and did her post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School.

Yu Qiu

Learning “Grammars” and “Semantics” by Protein Language Models (PLMs)

Dr. Yu Qiu is currently the Head of AI innovation for Antibody at Sanofi. He earned his PhD in Biochemistry from USTC in 2012, where he mainly used NMR and crystallography to study protein structure and dynamics. Then he moved to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as a postdoc where he studied a Ubiquitin-like protein conjugation cascade in autophagy by biochemistry, enzymology, crystallography and EM. In 2017, Yu became a Senior Scientist in the Biologics Research department of Sanofi. At Sanofi, he solves structures of antibody-antigen complexes by crystallography and cryoEM and provides structure-based antibody engineering support to projects in multiple therapeutic areas.
Since 2022, he has led a global team focusing on AI innovation for antibody repertoire mining, ngineering, multi-specifics design, developability prediction, and de novo design.

Man Hee Suh

Engineering Complex Antigens for Biopharma Industry: Major Histocompatibility Complexes and Multipass

Dr. Man-Hee Suh is co-founder and CTO of Kactus Biosystems, a biotech startup that uses its proprietary technologies to develop and engineer recombinant proteins and enzymes for antibody drug discovery and CGT industries. Dr. Suh has a combined experience of over 20 years in biological research, leading teams across matrixed organizations on the execution and delivery on multiple technologies and biologics
development projects. Dr. Suh served as Principle Investigator of multiple projects for US industry and government

Marie Zhu

Superior Payload-linker and Conjugation Technologies for Novel and Better ADCs

Dr. Marie Zhu is currently Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of WuXi XDC, who is a wellknown expert and executive with over 28 years of experience in drug development at Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Xencor, Astellas, MabPlex, and RemeGen. She led and directly participated in development of 25+ biologics (mAb, fusion protein, and BsAb) for Ph 1-3 clinical trials. Since 2009, Dr. Zhu has been focusing on novel ADC development and led her teams winning 10+ FDA/NMPA approved ADC INDs, Enfortumab Vedotin (Padcev), one of these ADCs, was granted an approved BLA for urothelial cancer treatment by FDA in Dec 2019; Dr. Zhu returned to China from US in 2019 and led the late-stage CMC work and the BLA filing for Disitamab Vedotin (Aidexi), the first ADC developed in China. Aidexi was granted an approved NDA by NMPA for gastric cancer treatment in June 2021, which became a big milestone in the China's biotech industry. Dr. Zhu’s technical expertise includes novel drug-linker development and sitespecific conjugation platform for discovering novel ADCs, cell line development, cell culture process development, purification process development, conjugation process development, process scale-up, clinical production, late-phase process development, process characterization, and process validation to support BLA filing. Dr. Zhu earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Tsinghua University and her doctoral degree in chemical engineering (minor in Biotechnology) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States.

Yang Liu

CD24-Siglec Pathway in Cancer Therapy

Dr. Yang Liu is a scientist and entrepreneur. Over 30 years, he has worked as faculty member in major research universities, including NYU Medical Center, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, Children’s National Medical Center and University of Maryland, and led biotechnology startups. Dr. Liu co-founded and led OncoImmune, Inc, AcroImmune, Inc. and OncoC4 to translate his scientific discoveries to develop therapies for COVID-19 and cancer, with a success in phase III clinical trial showing that CD24Fc, the first-in-class drug significantly accelerated clinical recovery and reduced
disease progress of patients with severe and critical COVID-19. These data results in acquisition of OncoImmune by Merck, Inc and founding of OncoC4, which focuses on cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Liu is a pioneer in cancer immunotherapy and development a new concept in immunotherapy. As a cofounder, Chairman and CEO, Dr. Liu is leading OncoC4, Inc., which is making rapidly progress in clinical translation of the new concept.
Dr. Liu was elected as Fellow of American Association for Advancement of Science in 2004

Opening Remarks

Jingsong Wang, Chairman and CEO, Harbour BioMed

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Announcements of Chinese Antibody Society

Bo Liu, President, Chinese Antibody Society

Announcements of Chinese Antibody Society

Overview of Chinese Antibody Society

Peng Lin, President-elect, Chinese Antibody Society

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Keynote lecture: Cancer Immunotherapy

Gordon Freeman, (Keynote Speaker) Professor of Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School

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Isolation of Functional mAbs from People Receiving Experimental Vaccines Progress and Outlook

Shan Lu, Professor Emeritus, University of Mass Chan Medical School

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Coffee Break, Exhibition & Poster Hall Open (10:00 AM - 11:00 AM)

Organizer, , The Chinese Antibody Society

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Learning “Grammars” and “Semantics” by Protein Language Models (PLMs)

Yu Qiu, Head of AI Innovation, Large Molecule Research, Sanofi

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Developing Antibodies Targeting LILRB2/TREM2 in Alzheimer’s Disease

Zhiqiang An, Vice President of Drug Discovery, UTHealth Houston

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Lunch Sponsor Presentation (12:00 PM - 12:10 PM)

Organizer, , The Chinese Antibody Society

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Lunch (12:10 PM - 1:00 PM)

Organizer, , The Chinese Antibody Society

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Quantifying the Success of Antibody Therapeutics

Janice Reichert, COO, The Antibody Society

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Superior Payload-linker and Conjugation Technologies for Novel and Better ADCs

Marie Zhu, CTO, Wuxi XDC

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Coffee Break, Exhibition & Poster Hall Open (2:35 PM - 3:20 PM)

Organizer, , The Chinese Antibody Society

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Engineering Complex Antigens for Biopharma Industry: Major Histocompatibility Complexes and Multipass

Man Hee Suh, CTO, Kactus

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CD24-Siglec Pathway in Cancer Therapy

Yang Liu, Founder, Chairman and CEO, OncoC4

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Generation of Camel and Shark Nanobodies Neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 and Lassa Virus

Mitchell Ho, Editor-in-Chief, Antibody therapeutics and Senior Investigator, NIH

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Closing Remarks

Mitchell Ho, Editor-in-Chief, Antibody therapeutics and Senior Investigator, NIH

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Exhibition & Poster Hall Open (5:00 PM - 6:00 PM)

Organizer, , The Chinese Antibody Society

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Closing Dinner (By Invitation Only) (6:30 PM - 8:30 PM

Organizer, , The Chinese Antibody Society

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