A photo of six people.

Startup Aims to Boost the Discovery of Antibody-Based Therapeutics

By Amy Pavlak Laird Email Amy Pavlak Laird

Heidi Opdyke

Two Carnegie Mellon University scientists, Robert van de Weerd and Chris Szent-Gyorgyi, have invented a new way to discover antibodies that could accelerate the development of next-generation antibody therapies. Their startup, Biocognon, is developing a revolutionary antibody-discovery platform that transcends current limitations in the field.

A significant portion of drugs currently being developed are based on antibodies, making them a substantial segment of the global pharmaceutical market. Biocognon’s platform, which focuses on Nanobodies, an antibody fragment that’s one tenth the size of conventional antibodies, expands the frontiers of antibody discovery through the seamless integration of emerging technologies such as synthetic biology and AI, driving innovation across diagnostics, research, personalized medicine, and pandemic response.

“Our platform is ideally suited for the development of new classes of therapeutics where very rapid, adaptable and inexpensive response is required, such as in truly personalized treatments of continuously changing tumors or in rapidly evolving viral pandemics where passive vaccines need to be generated at scale,” said Szent-Gyorgyi, a senior scientist at the former Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center (MBIC) at Carnegie Mellon and co-founder of Biocognon.

“Discoveries are expected to lead to development and commercialization of new therapeutic treatments for multiple human diseases and conditions, including cancer, rare disorders, and infectious diseases,” added van de Weerd, a senior scientist formerly at MBIC and co-founder of Biocognon. He's also currently a project scientist at the Neurogenomics lab of Andreas Pfenning, an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department.

Antibodies are highly specialized proteins that play a key role in the body’s ability to mount an accurate and effective immune response. Each antibody can bind to only one specific antigen, whether it’s a molecule in bacteria, virus or mutated cell, that the body flags as foreign. The goal of antibody discovery platforms is to take a target antigen of interest and find an antibody that specifically binds to it. The antibody can then be further developed as a targeted drug therapy.

Szent-Gyorgyi and van de Weerd have leveraged their strengths in molecular biology, genetic engineering, chemistry, biosensor design and synthetic biology to design an antibody screening platform that is unlike anything else out there. All current Nanobody and antibody discovery technologies require isolating and purifying the antigen and then running a screen against that single antigen or multiple antigens in parallel to discover antibodies that specifically bind it — a resource- and labor-intensive process.

Biocognon’s approach does not require physical, purified target antigens or nanobodies. Instead, they engineer yeast cells to both secrete target antigens and display nanobodies on their surface. The yeast cells also contain a novel fluorescent biosensor that enables the yeast cells to self-report when a secreted antigen binds to a nanobody on the cell surface.

The innovative biosensors, developed at MBIC over the past two decades, are unique to Biocognon’s platform. They enable the rapid screening of a large number of antigen-Nanobody pairs simultaneously. This combinatorial, high-throughput approach integrates bioinformatics and artificial intelligence tools to efficiently identify Nanobodies of interest.

“This integrated system enables, for the first time, true multiplexed, many-on-many, screening,” van de Weerd said.

By co-expressing both target antigen and Nanobodies within a single-cell system, Biocognon’s platform can access previously un-targetable and challenging proteins, enabling therapeutic opportunities that remain beyond the reach of conventional platforms.

In 2024, the company received a Small Business Innovation Research grant (SBIR) from the National Science Foundation to build the fundamental technology, and an SBIR from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences to leverage their technology to discover nanobodies that recognize GPCR proteins, an important class of proteins targeted by 30% of all marketed drugs, yet notoriously difficult for antibody discovery and often inaccessible to conventional platforms.

Szent-Gyorgyi and van de Weerd founded Biocognon in 2023 to bring the fluorescent biosensor technology created at the MBIC to the antibody-discovery field. Biocognon, LLC holds exclusive patent rights to the underlying technology, which was invented by Szent-Gyorgyi, van de Weerd and colleagues at MBIC. It is the sixth company spun out from MBIC over the past 30 years. MBIC’s technologies significantly influenced research across a wide variety of research fields and is indispensable in the biotech industry and in drug discovery of protein-based therapeutics. MBIC’s imaging technologies enabled DNA sequencing and the human genome project, high throughput cellular screening platforms, and current biologics, diagnostics and antibody platforms. Biocognon has a laboratory at Carnegie Mellon and a business address at 2403 Sidney Street, Suite 255, Pittsburgh, PA 15203.