Andrew Buchanan

speaker

155 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 22 Jun

Andrew Buchanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Talking Techniques · AI & Antibodies miniseries | Designing smart antibodies in the age of AI · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

Hi, I'm Andy Buchanan.

Uh it's great to meet you, Tristan, good to be here.

I'm based in the Cambridge, UK, and I've been working in the biologics uh industry now for twenty five years, uh focused on the discovery and early development of therapeutic antibodies.

And the teams we've been part of have delivered over twenty molecules to first in human studies and three of those to date have become launched products and it's been brilliant to hear highlights from a few of the people or their families that the products have helped.

But perhaps more relevant for today's podcast is that since around twenty sixteen I've been collaborating and working alongside machine learning and AI experts to develop and validate this kind of tech for antibody and peptide discovery and optimisation.

Uh and now, as you mentioned, I'm uh the S VP and head of discovery for a biotech.

We are in stealth mode, but we're bringing forward new antibody molecules for clinical development.

Molecules that can leverage orthogonal pathways and we aim to build molecules that can better serve patients who still need more treatment options.

Yeah, well I suppose first of all, although I was the first author on the article, it was very much a collegiate and collaborative effort uh across uh with industry peers to really get a perspective that we hope helps others, uh particularly in the early career as they think about antibody uh discovery.

But yes, the rise of this multi-specific antibodies and the AI tech is both serendipitous and inextricably linked.

So the first biospecific technologies were patented and published in the late two thousands, early twenty tens, and that has turned into a flurry of biospecific molecules approved in the twenty twenties.

And on the AI s side we've been able to visualize antibody antigen structures from the eighties.

But the foundational AI tech for antibody design is very recent, with papers really from twenty twenty one onwards.

So it's perhaps uh too early to say we're seeing a shift in design strategies.

But now these different expert disciplines are aligning more and more, which is fantastic.

So the antibodies in AI are increasingly coupled because the more complex the molecules with multi specifics, you have choices around format and mechanism, that means you have more design parameters.

And that's exactly where AI starts to deliver real value over wet lab alone.

And the other

significant part is that AI plays a very prominent role now in enabling target selection.

It provides insights from omics data, especially the spatial proteomics, as antibodies need a protein to actually act on.

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