AbCellera opened its doors to the local biotech, research, and business community on Tuesday evening to celebrate the official opening of its new home in the heart of Vancouver. Guests celebrated with guided tours of the facilities and enjoyed cocktails around scientific posters, company slideshows, and photography exhibition.
Carl Hansen, CEO of AbCellera, addressed the party, thanking the University of British Columbia and colleagues in the Vancouver biotech community for playing a crucial role in helping the company get started.
“This marks a major milestone for AbCellera as we continue to build a position as the industry leader in therapeutic antibody discovery. It also signals the gathering power of Vancouver’s biotech sector that includes a cluster of academic and industry leaders in areas of biologics, personalized cancer genomics, and stem cell science. AbCellera is proud to take its place as a major player in British Columbia’s life sciences innovation economy,” said Hansen.
AbCellera moved from its incubation space at the University of British Columbia to a 21,000 square foot building with new offices and custom-built laboratories. The facility houses AbCellera’s rapidly growing multidisciplinary team of cell and protein scientists, bioinformaticians, and engineers alongside the finance and business groups. The space will support expanded research capacity to meet the demands of its successful partnership business.
AbCellera is a technology-leading innovator in therapeutic antibody discovery and immune profiling. It was founded in 2012 by Hansen and a group of four trainees based on a suite of microfluidics technologies derived from their research at the University of British Columbia. Since then, AbCellera has grown to over 60 employees.
Through partnerships and collaborations, AbCellera is addressing some of the biggest challenges in the biotech industry, including discovering antibodies for CAR-T therapies, neurodegenerative disease, fibrosis, and fighting infectious diseases with the development a global pandemic prevention platform. Some of their early successes against GPCR and ion channel targets have advanced into preclinical development.
About AbCellera Biologics Inc.
AbCellera is a privately held company that engages in partnerships to discover and develop next-generation therapeutic antibodies. AbCellera’s single-cell platform integrates end-to-end capabilities for therapeutic antibody discovery through a combination of technologies including proprietary immunizations, microfluidics, high-throughput imaging, genomics, computation, and laboratory automation. Ultra-deep screening of single B cells allows unprecedented access to natural immune responses, enabling rapid isolation of large and diverse panels of high-quality lead antibodies from any species, including humans. abcellera.com