Etcembly

Etcembly, based in the Atlas Centre at Harwell Campus is a Generative AI (artificial intelligence) T Cell Receptor (TCR) discovery engineering company.

T cells are immune cells in the blood that help to control and shape the immune response to protect the body. The key part of the T cell involved in the immune response is called the T cell receptor (TCR), a protein complex of two chains found on the surface of the T cell. The human TCR 'repertoire' or collection is huge, with 100 million different TCRs available to protect us against infection and even cancer, these proteins can be harnessed to help in the battle against cancer; TCRs are a promising class of immunotherapeutics.

Etcembly has developed a proprietary machine learning platform, EMLyTM, designed to learn from a massive in-house TCR repertoire database, with the aim of identifying, engineering and guiding to produce the highest quality, powerful and safe TCRs for use in cancer therapy.

Etcembly uses the facilities at Research Complex for two main reasons:

1.       Protein work; e.g., production of the peptide: human leukocyte antigens complex (pHLA). This vital step in the design and engineering of therapeutic TCRs enables us to test specificity, selectivity, strength of binding (avidity) and tendency to bind (affinity) of the TCR to the pHLA and therefore gauge whether the TCR is a good therapeutic candidate.

2.       Cell culture and microscopy; the development and use of several of our in vitro methods relies on cell based assays.