Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences Adds Carterra's LSAXT Instrument to Speed Drug and Vaccine Research and Advance Patient Care

The Center for Structural Biology in the School of Medicine Basic Sciences will be a hub of research innovation using Carterra's platform in traditional and AI-driven workflows for characterizing both antibodies and other biomolecules

SALT LAKE CITY and NASHVILLE, Tenn., Sept. 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Carterra^® Inc., the world leader in innovative technologies enabling high-throughput biology, and the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences announced today the addition of the Carterra LSA^XT label-free interaction analysis platform to the Center for Structural Biology (CSB). Vanderbilt and Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers will be able to discover and characterize large molecules including antibodies.

Carterra LSAXT HT-SPR instrument

"Many of our researchers are trying to identify antibodies that bind to a protein involved in health or disease," said Borden Lacy, director of the CSB and Edward and Nancy Fody Chair in Pathology and professor of biochemistry and pathology, microbiology and immunology. "The ability to rapidly screen and quantify binding for large libraries of antibodies will shape the way molecular discovery moves forward at Vanderbilt. The work we spend months on will now be completed in a matter of days. It is incredibly exciting." 

Carterra's LSA platform was used by pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly during the COVID-19 pandemic to find antibodies effective against SARS-CoV-2. Within 90 days of isolating antibodies from an early COVID-19 survivor, Lilly was in clinical trials with the world's first COVID-19 therapeutic, the antibody Bamlanivimab.

BAM, as it became known, is the fastest drug ever discovered and saved countless lives.  The publication in Science describing the feat concluded, "The resulting speed at which this drug discovery and development effort progressed…is a testament to the advanced discovery and characterization platforms."

Vanderbilt investigators will now be able to leverage the Carterra platform for a variety of research aims. 

Two projects that are getting early traction include:

Stephanie Wankwicz, assistant professor of molecular physiology and biophysics and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Applied AI in Protein Dynamics, is elucidating the role of entropy in substrate specificity and catalysis.  Wankowicz is planning to use Carterra's platform to more quickly and efficiently analyze a large panel of peptide sequence variants against a kinase. Older methods are very low throughput and would require high concentrations of the protein/peptide solution.

Brian Wadzinski, associate professor of pharmacology, recently submitted a grant application to characterize pan- and phosphor-specific nanobodies for investigating MAPK and PP2A signalling. Affinity measurements for these large panels of nanobodies and high-resolution epitope binning can only be performed on Carterra's platform.

The LSA^XT instrument includes hardware and software features that build upon the capabilities of Carterra's original and highly successful LSA instrument while maintaining its impressive throughput and sample efficiency. The LSA platform delivers 100 times the data in 10 percent of the time-to-answer and uses only 1 percent of the sample required by other label-free platforms.

Just last year, Vanderbilt launched the Center for Applied AI in Protein Dynamics which will also benefit from the addition of Carterra's platform.  The LSA^® is the only label-free biosensor that can generate enough data, quickly and efficiently, to train algorithms and learning models used to predict the affinity and epitope coverage of drug candidates. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies who have now moved to AI-driven drug discovery workflows have standardized on the LSA.

"Vanderbilt has always led its peers in research innovation," commented Tim Germann, Chief Commercial Officer at Carterra. "To enable the use of AI in antibody discovery and characterization by adding the LSA^XT to its stable of technologies cements Vanderbilt's position as the academic leader in this rapidly evolving research landscape."

Since its launch in 2018, Carterra's interaction analysis platform has penetrated 19 of the largest 20 pharmaceutical companies, major universities and vaccine makers, contract research organizations (CROs), and biotechs on four continents. Characterizing binding kinetics and epitope coverage of large numbers of antibodies in early research has been transformative. The LSA platform has been profiled in multiple Science, Nature, and Cell peer-reviewed papers.

Media Contact:
Cheri Salazar, Sr. Marketing Manager
Carterra, Inc.
(408) 594-9400
Csalazar@carterra-bio.com 

About Carterra, Inc.
Carterra^® is privately held and is the leading provider of high-throughput technologies designed to accelerate and improve the discovery of novel therapeutic candidates. Carterra's LSA^® instrument, software, and consumables for biotherapeutic discovery and characterization 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. 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 new LSA^XT provides enhanced optics to enable additional applications in biotherapeutic discovery and characterization. Carterra, Inc. is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has Customer Experience Centers in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Boston, Manchester, England, and Munich, Germany. Carterra products are available in Asia-Pacific and Oceania through our exclusive distributor, Revvity. For additional information, please visit www.carterra-bio.com.

About the Vanderbilt Center for Structural Biology
The Vanderbilt Center for Structural Biology promotes the broad use of structural biology approaches in all life science research and provides resources for education and training in state-of-the-art technologies. Uniquely, the CSB merges applications of high resolution structural biology disciplines, X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, cryo-electron microscopy and computational biology, with the biophysical instrumentation needed to characterize biomolecular interactions. This strategy allows researchers to solve fundamental structural problems in medicine and biology. The CSB facilitates collaborations with investigators across a range of Departments in both the College of Arts and Science, the School of Medicine Basic Sciences, and the School of Medicine in Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The CSB is directed by Borden Lacy, Edward and Nancy Fody Chair in Pathology and professor of biochemistry and pathology, microbiology and immunology.