The ISPRI toolkit is a secure web-based platform that allows researchers to rapidly assess the immunogenic risk of biologic candidates. The fully integrated computational immunology toolkit can be used to identify sequence regions that could elicit unwanted immune responses and enables developers to re-engineer early-stage candidates to reduce risk. Most notably, ISPRI allows developers to characterize the phenotype of immune response to biologics by identifying both inflammatory and regulatory T cell epitopes in biologic sequences – a distinguishing feature of the platform.

Eisai is a global pharmaceutical company addressing the key therapeutic areas of tropical diseases, oncology, and neurology, with a particular focus on dementia. Eisai's R&D organization plans to utilize the ISPRI toolkit to screen a wide range of therapeutic modalities, including antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, and non-antibody protein therapeutics.

Dr. Takashi Owa, Eisai's CSCO said about the new partnership: "We look forward to having an advanced in silico toolkit such as ISPRI at our disposal to better understand and mitigate the immunogenicity of our early-stage biologic drug candidates."

"We're eager to enable Eisai with incorporation of rapid, secure, and advanced immunogenicity risk assessment into their drug discovery process," said EpiVax CEO/CSO, Annie De Groot, MD.