Carterra, specialist in label-free high throughput antibody screening and characterisation, has closed on a round of equity financing led by PerkinElmer. Current Carterra investors Telegraph Hill Partners and Ballast Point Ventures also participated in the financing round.
The Carterra LSA platform for accelerating the discovery of therapeutic antibodies has become a standard in many of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, as well as leading biotech, academic, CRO and government research labs. The Carterra LSA platform is also being used in COVID-19 therapeutics research including by CoVIC, the worldwide consortium funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The LSA platform enables 100 times the binding data to be collected in 10% of the time with 1% of the sample versus competing platforms.
“Biologics and biotherapeutics discovery and development is a very dynamic area of pharma science and one that is important to PerkinElmer’s strategy as we work with scientists around the world to help them develop new ways to fight chronic disease and outbreaks like COVID-19,” said Dr. Alan Fletcher, VP and GM Life Sciences at PerkinElmer.
“Carterra’s innovative high throughput SPR (surface plasmon resonance) technology is poised to disrupt biologics research in the areas of both upstream profiling and downstream QA/QC.”
Traditional antibody discovery relies on low-resolution screening techniques to triage antibody libraries down to a small number of candidates, which are then characterized on low-throughput biosensors. The Carterra LSA platform turns that model on its head by allowing the rapid and high-resolution characterisation of entire antibody libraries for binding kinetics and epitope, thereby combining screening and characterisation into one step. This saves significant time, money, and precious samples. It also reduces the risk of missing a potential blockbuster candidate. Biologics developers now have an enormous advantage in differentiating their molecules from competitors’ drugs and establishing intellectual property claims.
“The LSA platform is the state of the art in biologics discovery,” said Josh Eckman, Carterra’s Chief Executive Officer. “We are thrilled to have PerkinElmer as an investor and look forward to working together to advance our shared visions to improve drug discovery and life science research.”
