[Song Young-doo, Edaily Reporter] Syntekabio, a South Korean AI drug discovery company, announced Tuesday that it has partnered with U.S.-based antibody engineering specialist OCMS Bio to launch a new joint service offering ultra-fast antibody discovery and validation. The service integrates Syntekabio’s AI-driven modeling with OCMS Bio’s proprietary cell-based screening technology to identify and verify antibody drug candidates in a single step.

The service leverages Syntekabio’s AI platform, Ab-ARS(Antibody Auto Report System), which designs numerous antibody variants by modifying complementarity-determining region(CDR) sequences and predicts their binding affinities. These in silico-generated antibodies are then passed to OCMS Bio, which uses its On-Cell mAb Screening(OCMS) technology to simultaneously evaluate antigen-binding strength for up to 50,000 antibody variants expressed in mammalian cells.

According to the companies, the platform enables a complete workflow from computational design to functional screening within a dramatically shortened timeframe of six to ten months. In the first phase(approximately six months), the system is expected to identify lead antibodies that bind effectively to target antigens even at low concentrations. A second phase(around four months) is available for further optimization, aiming to discover candidates with binding affinities in the picomolar range.

The process includes expression-level evaluation, antigen affinity testing, and identification of high-performing antibodies using next-generation sequencing(NGS) directly from polyclonal cell pools allowing the entire discovery and selection process to be completed in one round.

“The synergy between OCMS Bio’s rapid, high-throughput antibody screening technology and our AI antibody platform powered by our in-house supercomputing infrastructure will significantly accelerate antibody discovery timelines” said Jongseon Jeong, CEO of Syntekabio. “We expect this service to become a game changer in the field of therapeutic antibody development.”

The company highlighted that this integrated, one-shot platform is particularly well-suited for clients seeking to discover new antibody drugs quickly and efficiently, especially in cases where conventional screening timelines are too slow to meet fast-evolving R&D needs.