COGNANO was established for the purpose of designing "alpaca antibody" in the past. However, as there is already a "monoclonal antibody" with a 50-year history, there is no reason to adopt an alpaca antibody unless it has an advantage. What is the advantage? The motive for establishing the company was simple.

1. there is no other substance in the biological world (i.e., the universe) that exhibits molecular interaction (binding force) with as much specificity as antibodies. The only hyper-variable region in the genome that can change, which organisms should inherit (inherit) unchanged, is the antibody gene, and the antibody (acquired immunity) is a miraculous biological system that was created to counter foreign enemies.
2. In this sense, "monoclonal antibodies" are biomaterials with tremendous potential, and have been indispensable materials for medical testing and drug discovery for 50 years.
3. However, monoclonal antibodies are complex structures consisting of light and heavy chains, and they cannot be easily converted into information. Currently, only "useful antibodies" obtained by chance are commercialized.
4. If antibodies that can be converted into information exist, they will become the best bio-recognition tool.
5. it must bring a new world view. I wonder if such a wonderful system exists

Alpaca antibodies consist only of heavy chains, and the encoding genes can be decoded by a next-generation sequencer (NGS). Alpaca antibodies had been discovered by chance by Belgian researchers in 1989 as a special small antibody. It is obvious that immunizing (vaccinating) an organism with only antibodies that protect it can give us an almost infinite variety of data. If we as researchers were serious about handling data, we needed to ensure the quantity and quality of information, and for this purpose, live animals showing immune responses were essential. There are artificial methods to modify antibodies and peptides in vitro, but the only way to increase connectivity is to make a trade-off at the expense of the diversity that nature produces.

As of 2022, there are only about 1,000 heavy chain antibodies (VHH) registered in public databases. COGNANO, on the other hand, has developed a technique to accumulate quantity (number of clones and sequence certainty) while ensuring quality (affinity and specificity) of VHH data, and has successfully generated hundreds of millions of antigen-tagged reads. This fact indicates that teams other than ours have either given up on big data acquisition of VHH antibodies due to cost issues, etc., or it is technically difficult to execute. Or the existence of channels through which antibody diversity can be used has not been brought to awareness (because it is too obvious). Not many people get a huff when they see an apple fall from a tree.

So, what can we actually do with alpaca antibody VHH data? What exactly do we mean by "a view of the world to come?" Let me try to imagine it mathematically here

1. since humans have about 100,000 different proteins, the number of sites (epitopes) as antigens recognized by antibodies would be on the order of the seventh power of 10, even if the number of sites (epitopes) is a hundredfold
2. To cover 10 to the 7th power, it would be sufficient to credit about 10 to the 9th power of 10 types of antibodies as antigen and tagging information, taking into account the redundancy of about 10 to 100 antibodies that accept fluctuations (in the quantum theory sense).
3. On the other hand, the theoretical number of possible combinations of about 50 variable site sequences in a VHH antibody is 50 to the power of 20 natural amino acids, or about 10 to the 70th power. This information coverage power seems overwhelming. However, it is not known whether the antibody gene is able to select all the possibilities equally, or whether there are any limiting rules.
4. In this situation, what types of antibodies can COGNANO obtain data on?

The people in charge of GoogleMap must have thought about how much storage space would be needed to retrieve all the maps of the earth as photographic data, and what kind of program would be needed to recall them on demand. We did too, and we know that COGNANO's library reaches the 8th power of 10 and can scale to about the 9th power of 10 clones. This was the beginning of the business of making biotechnology into mathematics, much as John Hanke in the 20th century aimed to make maps of the world instantly visible.

COGNANO continues to accumulate VHH data with the goal of creating a world where generalized antibody information becomes a map of the biospace.