Abalone Bio and Pfizer Launch Research Collaboration to Discover GPCR-Modulating Antibodies

The collaboration will leverage Abalone Bio’s Functional Antibody Selection Technology platform for an undisclosed target

EMERYVILLE, CA, UNITED STATES, January 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Abalone Bio, a therapeutics biotech company that uniquely measures and leverages large-scale activity datasets to discover rare activating antibodies to successfully drug challenging targets, today announced a research collaboration with Pfizer. Under the agreement, Abalone Bio will apply its Functional Antibody Selection Technology (FAST) platform to discover G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) activity-modulating antibodies for a challenging collaboration target. The collaboration will leverage Abalone Bio’s functional, high-throughput screening capabilities to generate antibodies that will be evaluated by Pfizer.

“Abalone Bio’s FAST platform’s capability to generate functionally active GPCR antibodies, presents an opportunity to push the boundaries of therapeutic antibody discovery,” said Richard Yu, PhD, Co-founder and CEO of Abalone Bio. “We believe this collaboration could unlock new approaches to potential treatments for diseases with high unmet need, by targeting biology in a way that has long been considered intractable.”

GPCRs are large, dynamic membrane proteins that require precise structural adjustments to modulate their activities. Antibody agonists for GPCRs can offer specificity and functionality beyond what current drugs provide, but discovering them remains a pressing challenge. The FAST platform enables direct measurement of the functional activity of hundreds of millions of antibodies in a single experiment. These large-scale functional datasets uniquely fuel Abalone Bio’s proprietary AI-powered workflow to identify GPCR agonists without any external data, such as structural information. Unlike traditional antibody discovery methods that focus on binding affinity, Abalone’s approach uses engineered cells to directly measure antibody function at an unmatched scale to produce the large-scale, quality data needed.

Under the terms of the agreement, both companies will contribute resources toward the discovery, screening and evaluation of antibodies. All financial and operational details are confidential.

About Abalone Bio

Abalone Bio is changing antibody drug discovery by addressing one of the most challenging problems in pharma: the functional modulation—especially activation—of hard-to-drug membrane proteins, starting with G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). Through its proprietary Functional Antibody Selection Technology (FAST), Abalone Bio measures functional activity data at the largest scale to uniquely enable AI-driven discovery of active therapeutics. By engineering cells to assess the activity of millions of antibody variants, the company produces the scale of data necessary to leverage AI to discover functionally active antibodies. Abalone Bio’s next-generation biologic therapies, initially focused on metabolic disorders and inflammation, are transforming the therapeutic landscape.

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