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After selling his first company to Merck in 2006 for $400 million, Dartmouth College bioengineer Tillman Gerngross faced a tough decision about starting another company: choose a field with minimal competition but high risk of failure, or enter a space that was already clinically and commercially successful but crowded with rival technologies. He chose the latter when he chose antibodies. “I hypothesized that if we had a truly better way of discovering antibodies, there was business to be had,” says Gerngross.
Still, at the time, the pharmaceutical industry was already saturated with companies looking to identify new antibodies and engineer existing ones to be more effective. From a distance, pharma’s obsession with these Y-shaped proteins is baffling. Big and clunky proteins, antibodies take twice the ...
