Greetings! Welcome to the Alces Bioworks, Inc. blog.
This being the company’s first post, it seems appropriate to address an obvious question. Why was Alces Bioworks founded?
We, the founders of this company, are scientists. We have lived through the pain of waiting months for custom antibodies against protein targets we wanted to detect in simple assays such as ELISAs and western blots. Like you, we had bosses and funders who were waiting, not always patiently, for impactful results.
Antibodies are critical affinity reagents essential to life sciences research, as well as the development and manufacturing of biologics. However, the technology used to create monoclonal antibodies is now 50 years old. (It was published on August 1, 1975.) Although the approach has been tremendously successful, it is not perfect. In 2024, a team tested 614 commercial antibodies and reported that more than half did not work as advertised. The costs of bad antibodies have been estimated to exceed $1 billion each year.
While efforts are underway to improve the quality and reliability of antibodies, there are more than 6 million antibodies sold commercially. You could try your luck at the antibody reagent roulette. You had almost no choice… until now. This is what Alces Bioworks is all about: providing new, designed affinity reagents that are easily produced in a few weeks.
In the coming days and weeks, we will post more about this revolution in affinity reagents.
