Antibodies: Born for Protection, Engineered for Treatment

Aron Gyorgypal is a postdoctoral fellow in immunology at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He investigates how Antibodies interact with sensory neurons to shape allergic reactions and the way symptoms like itch are felt. We usually think of IgG antibodies as immune molecules that fight infections when we’re sick. But growing evidence from our lab shows that IgG also communicates with the nervous system. These antibodies can boost or calm immune responses, especially in allergy. When our skin encounters an allergen, sensory nerves rapidly signal “danger” to the brain, triggering an allergic reaction – but IgG can intercept this alarm and effectively tell the body and mind “we’re equipped to handle this.” This may help explain why some people live with manageable allergy symptoms while others become severely, even fatally, allergic

Glycans—the sugar structures on most biologics—have been treated as a manufacturing liability: a source of batch variability, regulatory friction, and failed programs. Yet they dictate half-life, immunogenicity, and effector function. Augment's GlycoTemplating uses AI-designed sequence context around glycosylation sites to direct glycan structure during standard mammalian expression—no exotic cell lines, no enzymatic remodeling. Glycans become a programmable design axis, novel and next-gen therapeutics, and mechanisms inaccessible to today's biologics engineers.