New Objective Webinar: Proteogenomic Identification of Hepatitis B Virus Presented by Robert Salzler and Mayank Srivastava, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals

February 15, 2023 – Littleton, MA (USA) Mike Lee, CEO, together with Emily Ehrenfeld, Co-Founder and President, New Objective, hosted an event featuring the heated PicoChip as a standardized platform for immunopeptidomic research conducted at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Emily launched the event with her opening statement: “The benefit of the patient is at the forefront of all we do.”

Amanda Berg, Vice President, New Objective, introduced the heated PicoChip platform developed by New Objective – “An easy-to-use solution that transforms emitters to meaningful results.” The PicoChip delivers a high performance, robust, reproducible and reliable solution for clinical proteomic applications. Helena Svobodova, Product Manager, New Objective, welcomed and introduced Robert Salzler telling the story of the beginning of his relationship with New Objective. “It started with a call from Mike to Robert, with a shared objective to work together on an industrialized platform and today we are celebrating Robert’s work on immunopeptidomics.”

Robert Salzler, Team Leader for Immunopeptidomics (Discovery and Targeted) for Oncology, Infectious Disease and Autoimmunity, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, shared the overview of various antibody therapies developed at Regeneron to address some of the most pressing health issues today by putting the patient first at every stage of the clinical research. Robert highlighted his experience with New Objective products and how the relationship with New Objective developed from a simple emitter request to working with state-of-the-art solutions. The heated PicoChip columns deliver the desired results  – “Very happy with these – will be the foundation of our system.” “The heated PicoChip lasts about a month with little to no interference.”

“We need to know what peptides are presented on the surface of cells.  The only tool for this is mass spectrometry.” – Robert Salzler, Regeneron

Robert then introduced his colleague Mayank Srivastava, Scientist, Proteomics and Immunopeptidomics at Regeneron and lead researcher on the recent publication on Proteogenomic identification of Hepatitis B virus (HBV) genotype-specific HLA-I restricted peptides from HBV-positive patient liver tissues. Mayank talked about the genomic variability of the HBV virus which when combined with the genomic difference in the patients make it very difficult to develop effective antibodies. “This virus integrates into the human genome randomly.” To address these challenges, Regeneron developed a patient specific database of viral peptides which along with HLA genotypes are used for target selection. As Mayank stated: “Mass spec is a discovery engine!”

We invite you to join the ongoing communication and celebration of research featuring our customers and collaborators. To quote Robert: “We are sharing one project – but we have hundreds of projects.” We look forward to our ongoing discussion.