In this interview segment, Roland Buelow, co‑founder and CEO of Open Monoclonal Technology (OMT), explains the strategic mission of OMT and the scientific rationale behind its core technology. He notes that access to animal‑derived antibody platforms has become scarce and costly after the acquisition of Medarex and Abgenix, creating a market need for alternative sources. OMT’s mission is to democratize access to such platforms by engineering animals—specifically genetically modified rats, termed T‑Rats—to produce fully human monoclonal antibodies. Buelow argues that antibodies generated in vivo benefit from the immune system’s natural optimization of affinity, specificity, solubility, and expression, leading to faster development compared with phage‑display libraries. He outlines OMT’s completed platform and its search for partners to utilize T‑Rats for new human antibody generation.
Dr. Bulow, what is the strategic mission of Open Monoclonal Technology, the company you founded in 2008?
So it is Open Monoclonal Technology's, or OMT's, mission to provide access to an antibody platform that's based on genetically engineered animals. Actually, the access to animal-derived antibody platforms has become more difficult, in particular because Medarex and Abgenix have been taken off the market. Abgenix was acquired by Amgen. Medarex was acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb., and the access to the Vigenon Velocymal mouse is very, very expensive. At the same time, it's clear that there's a demand to have access to an animal-derived antibody platform, and this is because development times with antibodies derived from animal-based platforms are actually substantially faster than development times with antibodies derived from phage display. And this is for the simple reason that the immune system actually optimizes antibodies in terms of affinity, specificity, solubility, levels of expression, and this is something a phage display library cannot do. Okay, so we have completed our platform now, and we are actually looking for partners that want to use our own T-Rats for the generation of new human monoclonal antibodies.
Okay, great. Please tell us more about the decision to use rats as an expression model for fully humanized antibodies and how you achieved this expression.
So the rat is a widely used laboratory animal. We understand very well how rats actually make their antibody repertoire, and this is pretty much the same as it happens in humans. So when we started our genetic engineering, we essentially had to do two steps to convince rats to make human antibodies. On the one hand, we had to inactivate endogenous rat antibody expression, and on the other hand, we had to introduce recombinant immunoglobulin loci that encode human antibodies. And the introduction of recombinant immunoglobulin loci, of course, had been accomplished before in other animals in the mouse, in the rabbit, and in the cow. But the inactivation of antibody expression in rats had not been done before. And this is for the simple reason that in rats, when we started, ooh, ooh, ooh, everywhere stem cells were not available and nuclear transfer technology was also not available. So we had to come up with a new strategy how to inactivate antibody expression in rats. And we did this using zinc finger nucleases. These are essentially restriction enzymes that have very large target sequences and therefore very specific. And we were the first ones to use a zinc finger nuclease in a rat embryo, which resulted in a pretty high frequency of knockout animals. And that's why we could publish this new technology in Science in 2009. So now we have the knockout animals and the animals that make human antibodies, and we crossbred these animals to get all the features in one animal.
