1. Tell us about your association with antibodies?
My group in Toronto is very interested in the field of antibody engineering. This is a method where we use genetic engineering or a recombinant DNA technology and understanding the proteins to design new antibodies which are proteins that we can put in a human body to treat cancer and many other infectious diseases. It is also a means of using these proteins for basic research in biology to understand how cells work and why diseases occur.
2. What are your research and contributions in the field of antibodies?
Our main findings have been synthetic antibodies that are engineered by us to work effectively in a human body. These are almost similar to natural antibodies that exist to fight infection but because they are engineered by us, they can be very precise and can also target cancer and other diseases. The relevance of these is that we can make new drugs very quickly based on antibodies that can treat disease that can’t be treated by other methods.
3. What are the technologies that you have developed so far?
Our main technology is called phage display which lets us make very large libraries of billions of antibodies. We can create them in a test tube and then from those billions of antibodies that we have made we can select only one that has all of the properties of a good drug. It is a very powerful means of making many different antibodies and then finding a single one that can target a particular cancer, virus or bacteria. The idea is that these technologies of large number of antibodies and discovering single antibodies that are effective drugs.
4. What are your views on personalized medicine?
We can now rapidly develop drugs that are known as targeted therapy which is the biggest development in cancer rather than just randomly killing cells like in chemotherapy and radiation does. These new antibody drugs are highly specialized to hit just one protein which is problematic in a cancer patient. It is much more effective and much less toxic. This means you don’t do any damage to the rest of the body and just target the cancer. This leads into personalized medicine where the drug is much more precisely designed to deal with your particular cancer rather than just the generally toxic compounds. Another big area has been arthritis which is often caused by body proteins that start attacking your body by mistake. We can make antibodies that neutralize those bad proteins and this has become very effective for other viruses such as dengue and Ebola.
5. Who is benefiting from these expensive technologies?
One problem with these technologies is that they are very expensive. Antibody drugs are very precisely designed and so far they have been proven to be much more expensive than the other drugs. Unfortunately limited population is currently benefiting and as we make the technology better we can make the drugs cheaper which is the major challenge for my lab and others to make it.
6. What brought you to India?
The reason why I am here in India is because I am talking to various groups about how we can work in India to learn lessons about what is actually needed at the practical level of patient care. I think we are going to make these kinds of drugs in different ways so that they are also cost effective.
7. What is the market potential of these antibody drugs?
Antibody drugs have become the largest selling drugs. Currently seven of the top ten drugs are antibodies. This is partly because they are so expensive but at the same time it is also because many patients are being treated. Currently worldwide antibodies are closing on 100 billion dollars US per year. Large growth is expected in emerging countries like India because people can afford better healthcare. The potential is very large especially if we can work in an Indian environment. This can be more cost effective as you can treat more patients. Currently the patient population is small but it is expanding and that is where there is a lot of potential to reach more patients.
8. What are your plans for India?
One of my goals in Toronto is to work with Indian companies and also universities because Canada and India are very complimentary. India has a much larger population and is very advanced in manufacturing and production. We hope with the basic research knowledge of Canada we can quickly discover new potential drugs and then work with counties here that are specialised in producing those drugs. We hope to have a Canada - India Alliance where we can make better drugs faster and more efficiently.
9. Where is antibodies field going?
The antibodies field is going into more therapeutics area. It started with cancer and now it is arthritis and other autoimmune and infectious diseases. We will see many more antibodies for many more diseases. On the production and process level we will see improvements that make them cheaper.
10. What changes do you expect to see in the next 5 years?
Five years from now I expect to see many more antibodies as drugs that are essentially guaranteed. I hope that the patient population that is treated with antibody will expand a lot and that would be the major challenge whether we can not only make antibody drugs but also expand the population base. This would be the major goal for the whole technology and industry.