Kumar Thurimella, MD PhD

Today, in collaboration with Anthropic, we’re excited to share rapid initial progress towards an antibody treatment for food allergy, which affects over 200 million people worldwide, discovered with the help of Claude. At Divergence Labs, we believe that AI can unlock the next generation of antibody therapeutics with more effective mechanisms than before. Such mechanisms are urgently needed in food allergy, which involve overcoming one of the tightest affinity protein pairs in immunology, IgE and its receptor FcεRI, on mast cells. Treatment with Xolair—the only approved antibody for food allergy—sequesters circulating IgE, but mast cells remain sensitized for weeks to months due to the extraordinarily slow dissociation of IgE from FcεRI. We envision a treatment that actively pulls IgE off of FcεRI, without waiting for natural dissociation. Like picking a lock, this requires the right combination of geometry and force. Our research team, working with Claude, ideated on mechanisms to accomplish this disruption, and converged on an antibody format with two arms with different functions and epitopes. Within one month, we designed, synthesized, and experimentally confirmed the biophysical function of the two arms, which we are now assembling into full therapeutic formats.