Ignacio Asial

Founder and CEO
DotBio Pte. Ltd

Dr. Ignacio Asial is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of DotBio, a Singapore-born biopharma company specialized in next-generation antibody therapies, with a particular focus on multi-specific antibodies for immuno-oncology.  He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University.
Prior to launching DotBio, Dr. Asial held diverse scientific positions. He worked in academia in institutions such as Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), University of California San Francisco (USA), and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), as well as in the private sector at Ambrilia Biopharma (France) and Genentech (USA).
Dr. Asial obtained a M. Eng. in Biotechnology from Ecole Supérieure d’Ingénieurs de Luminy / Polytech Marseille (France), a M.Sc. in Biochemistry, Structural Biology, Bioinformatics and Genomics from Aix-Marseille University (France), and a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He specializes in technology development, in particular in the fields of antibody engineering and directed evolution.

Speech title & Synopsis

High throughput prediction of the best multi-functional molecules to develop in the clinic through preclinical data analysis

The number of bi-specific molecules reaching clinical trials has grown exponentially over the last decade, and tri-specific molecules and antibody-drug conjugates are following a similar trajectory. However, the number of approvals of these multi-functional molecules remains incredibly low, with 95% clinical failure rates. One of the main issues in the industry includes a lack of understanding of the biology of disease in the context of dual therapeutic targeting, especially for complex and genetically diverse pathologies such as cancer. Another important one is technological bottlenecks preventing the generation of large number of multi-functional molecules and their side-by-side comparison, which forces companies to pursue a limited number of molecules in the clinic, usually backed by incomplete efficacy and safety data. DotBio has set up an antibody platform for the generation of large volumes of preclinical data comparing a large number of multi-functional antibody molecules. From this comparison, DotBio is able to select the molecules that are most potent among the panel tested, and eliminate the great majority of active yet inferior potential therapeutic candidates. By this process, only the molecules that consistently show superior therapeutic potential are selected for clinical development, therefore reducing risk of clinical failure.