“Synthetic Biology Company Providing You Your Dream Immune System”
Scientists have spent centuries in the pursuit of knowledge that the human body holds, Many have come and go during this long era of science and perfecting technology. Still the human body holds such mysteries that we are not able to unbox. Over the years these advances in science have benefited humans in many ways, preventing worldwide plagues and havocs that broke out in the past, wiping out half of the existence from our planet. In 600 million years of human history, human body has surpassed the barriers of evolution and made its way in to this modern world that we live in now. The capability to fight these deadly diseases has been hardwired in to our bodies that enabled us to survive this long. Some 50–60 years ago scientists didn’t quite understood the field of immunology, only scraps of this field was known among the scientific community.
Immune cells play a vital role in the body’s defense mechanisms, They take control of any pathological insults and deviations the body experiences. Now the question arises in our minds that is “Why engineer immune cells?” Millions and billions of microorganisms are interacting with us every second of our life, that are present in the air we breath and the food we eat, Still we manage to survive those interactions that’s because our body has a special code “To not let any foreign antigen out of sight because that can harmful for the body in some way”. Given these extraordinary properties of our body it highly benefits us to engineer immune cells that in collaboration with our body’s innate cells can fight against the invading pathogens. Synthetic immunology is the bio-engineering of such immune cells that integrate in to our immune system to manipulate it to the requirements the body requires. With the advancements of the modern world such as in the fields of Biotechnology, Gene editing and Bio-engineering, its easy to produce these immune-cells on a large scale.
Until, the need arises of taking affirmative action against these breakthroughs, Such was the in year 1983 when Human-Immuno-Deficiency(HIV) engulfed several countries around the globe professing every human life in its wake. Every man and women threatened by this undetected and untreatable disease. As this disease was related to immune system, a great number of studies regarding immunology led to a better and profound understanding of the immune system. Studies on these specific set of diseases proved very successful at the time that allowed scientists to understand the body’s immune system and how it produces a drug by itself to target the antigen that is causing the disease. The body’s response to those every selected foreign agent is different, immune system basically consists of two types of cells the T-cells and the B-cells, Primarily B-cells are responsible for any kind of possible action against any pathogen, because they produce antibodies that affect the antigen itself.
Ultimately, these outbreaks around the world encouraged researchers to tend to the problems at hand, changing the human history in relation with immunology. In light of these events antibodies were developed and perfected, Each antibody working against a specific disease. Effectiveness of these antibodies proved them useful making humans relying on them completely. Antibodies available to every person at local pharmaceuticals and drug stores. Furthermore, as these treatments were taking hold of the medical market, Major investors and pharmaceutical companies these antibody-based treatments, that allowed these drugs to manipulate body’s immune system at will to fend off the pathogen that is currently inhabiting the body. This led to a more sophisticated age of therapeutics. After all this time of technological advancements and important discoveries, researchers acquiring all the required information regarding immunology and other assorted fields companies like “Distributed Bio” Have taken these sole operations in hands redefining pharmaceuticals and designing therapeutics.
“We are now able to engineer antibodies in the lab faster than the body can do it,” says Jacob Glanville, a computational immuno-engineer and president of “Distributed Bio”. It has taken a long time for the scientists to understand the depths of the human immune system, but last but not least this spent was worth it. We are bare witnesses to the history of bio-engineering in this period of time how it flourished in the past three decades. Our future depends on it.
President of the “Distributed Bio” Jacob Glanville strengthened the foundations for his company with the assistance of his two friends in 2012. Glanville and his team started the company under promising terms by constituting a software on Amazon cloud that can be reached out in the world, So people can access this technology quite easily. “Distributed Bio” availed this strategy to cut of all the barriers that hold the world from computational immunology. This software helped people to do computational immunology of their own by understanding the laws of the human immune system. This program from its start was very successful and the company made a fortune from their system in a little amount of time. “Distributed Bio” then using the success and money from this global software system established a worthwhile “Antibody discovery and optimization” lab.
We started licensing out not just on the data, but the ability to actually engineer new medicines,” says Glanville. “That’s when our company really started growing much faster because that was worth a lot more. That bootstrapped us to the point where we’re producing therapeutics, which is where we are now”.
“Distributed Bio” has made many noted accomplishments in the last 7–8 years, with the software and the advance technology they used in their labs Antibody Discovery and its related researches have been quite remarkable. The company claims to have crossed humans in the matter of antibody production that takes place in the highly advanced labs with bleeding edge lab equipments. The company is also the provider for “Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim,Gilead, Teva which are some of the renowned pharmaceutical companies. With that being said, these technologies are slowly taking over the pharmacy market with over 30% of products that are antibody therapeutics.
As Glanville says,“If you can make an antibody, it’s an awesome drug,” he says, “but it’s really hard and time consuming. It can take over a year to do the engineering. It used to take longer.”
Currently the company is trying even shorter this span in which antibody production takes place with some of the great ideas Glanville introduced. Universal vaccine and Snake bite vaccine are the two projects that “Distributed Bio” is currently developing with the help of health organizations known as “NIH”, so the vaccines can be brought into open market and so, they shall be available to the public for use. The universal vaccine project is fueled by a major grant that “Distributed Bio” was given. This vaccine can protect against different kinds of flu and its aggressive resistant strains. The vaccine can provide immunity for several years after its administration. The snake bite vaccine depicts an interesting story of a guy that the company found out about, The person was immunized against the snake venom and had built an impressive kind of immunity against it. Turns out that the person, for the last 17 years was injecting himself with snake venom to build an immunity against the venom. When the company found out about this, this case helped a lot in their ongoing research. Blood samples were collected from the special person and his blood was screened for a bunch of different antibodies, This discovery paved its way through and provided information for the breakthrough the company was about to make. Within, sometime the company engineered an “antivenom” vaccine against the snake bite. Also “Distributed Bio” is using machine learning in the process.
[Your body] makes drugs faster and better than the entire pharmaceutical industry.
Jacob Glanville, Distributed Bio
