(EMEA) UCB, a global biopharmaceutical company, and XtalPi, a global leader in AI drug discovery, today announced a license agreement on XtalFold™, a biologics AI platform developed by Ailux Biologics, a division of XtalPi.

Under the agreement, Ailux Biologics grants UCB a non-exclusive license to leverage XtalFold™ for the discovery and engineering of biologics. XtalFold™ is a proprietary AI-based software suite that provides rapid and accurate structural insights to accelerate biologics innovation across multiple phases.

“UCB has long been a pioneer in leveraging computation to develop highly differentiated biologics that benefit patients.” stated Jian Ma, CEO of XtalPi, “We are proud to contribute to their efforts in creating therapies that transform lives.” Yi (Alex) Li, VP of XtalPi and Head of Ailux Biologics, said: “The recent Nobel Prize highlighted the groundbreaking impact of protein structure prediction. XtalFold™ exemplifies this innovation, offering a commercially validated solution with rapid industry adoption. We’re excited to join forces with UCB to further explore its potential.”

XtalFold™ utilizes sequence information alone to model the interaction between biomolecules, which forms the foundation of biotherapeutics like monoclonal antibodies. In rigorous benchmark studies, XtalFold™ achieved state-of-the-art performance in terms of overall success rate and the quality of hard-to-model regions like the antibody-antigen interface. XtalFold™ has been licensed to multiple global pharmaceutical companies and has delivered highly impactful results in a variety of projects, including antigen design, epitope identification, affinity maturation, pH-sensitivity engineering, and bispecifics design.

“UCB have a strong legacy of antibody discovery and engineering. We have established unique and powerful single-B cell screening and in vitro display discovery technologies to support hit identification and are pioneers in structure-based and computer-aided optimisation of molecules. The XtalFold™ license takes this further, integrating antibody-antigen structural insights into the entire antibody discovery and optimisation workflow,” said Daniel Lightwood, Head of Antibody Discovery and Optimisation. Alexander Hillisch, Head of Global CADD, UCB added, “Our decision to license this tool comes after extensive testing and evaluation against other computational approaches and we believe it has the potential to enhance UCB’s ability to rapidly and efficiently discover high quality therapeutic antibody candidates and ultimately deliver new medicines to patients.”