Icosagen Acquires the Carterra LSA Instrument to Significantly Enhance Its Antibody Screening Capabilities in the Discovery and Development of New Therapeutic and Diagnostic Antibodies

The addition of the LSA increases Icosagen’s end-to-end service capabilities for drug companies developing therapeutics worldwide

Tartu, Estonia and Salt Lake City, Utah, USA — March 20, 2023 — Icosagen Group, an established research-driven organization providing services for the discovery and production of mammalian cell-derived biopharmaceuticals, today announced that it has acquired the LSA^® platform from Carterra^®, a leading provider of high-throughput antibody screening and characterization solutions.

Icosagen Cell Factory (ICF) has grown into a mammalian Contract Research, Development, and Manufacturing Organization (CRDMO) for biopharmaceutical, biotechnology, and diagnostic industries, and offers seamless discovery, development, and manufacturing of mammalian therapeutic antibodies. Services cover up to early clinical candidate development, including stable CHO cell line development for 50L to 1000L GMP production runs. In 2022, ICF worked with more than 100 protein drug or vaccine development companies globally, producing more than 3000 different proteins. The acquisition of the Carterra LSA technology will significantly enhance the flexibility and throughput of antibody screening and characterization.

Carterra’s LSA will enable ICF to speed up and significantly enhance its end-to-end service capabilities for global biotechnology and pharmaceutical customers. ICF will also be able to offer automated workflows for their entire library of candidates by leveraging the LSA’s capture-based kinetics and affinity measurements, coupled kinetics, epitope binning, quantitation, epitope mapping, and blocking/neutralization assays.

“We are thrilled to be partnering with Carterra to integrate their cutting-edge LSA technology into our antibody discovery platform,” said Mart Ustav Jr., Chief Scientific Officer of Icosagen. “This collaboration will speed our discovery and development efforts saving us time and significantly enhancing our antibody screening capabilities. We are extremely excited to work with Carterra on developing new workflows that support our unique antibody discovery capabilities. Our joint commitment is to advance the field of antibody discovery and to improve human health.”

Carterra’s LSA^® biosensor for antibody discovery and characterization was launched in 2018.  The LSA combines patented microfluidics technology with real-time high-throughput Surface Plasmon Resonance (HT-SPR) and industry-leading data analysis and visualization software to revolutionize mAb screening. The release of the LSA set a new standard for high-throughput screening and characterization of antibodies and has been adopted as a standard in 19 of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, CROs, academia, the NIH, and the FDA.  Carterra’s LSA instrument, software, and consumables deliver up to 100 times the throughput of existing platforms in 10% of the time while using only 1% of the sample required by other systems.

“Icosagen’s vision for making drug discovery and development services faster and better is shared by all of us at Carterra,” said Tim Germann, Chief Commercial Officer at Carterra. “The LSA is a game-changing biologics discovery technology that has enabled rapid and high-definition characterization of entire antibody libraries. Icosagen joins the pace-setting group of researchers the world over deploying Carterra’s LSA to improve human health.”