Achilles Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company developing personalised T cell therapies targeting neoantigens

Industry: Biopharmaceuticals
Headquarters: London, UK
Employees: 260+

The problem

Achilles Therapeutics' Patent Counsel was regularly working with 1000+ results at any time and using other patent databases resulted in slow loading times for the full result set and for each subsequent page as the client was reviewing the results.

The solution

Swapping to PatBase drastically reduced loading times, especially after the PatBase 2.0 update in September 2019. They are now able to save time when handling larger result sets which can be better spent on other tasks.

Helping to make the right strategic business decisions

Achilles Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company developing personalised T cell therapies targeting neoantigens: protein markers unique to each individual that are present on the surface of a cancer cell and can be detected by the immune system. Their approach is based on the science of tumour evolution which allows them to identify neoantigens that arise early in the cancer’s development and are retained as each tumour grows.

These ‘clonal’ neoantigens are present on all the cancer cells and are completely absent from a patient’s healthy tissue. By directing T cells therapies to clonal neoantigens it is possible to target every cancer cell without attacking healthy tissue.

At Achilles Therapeutics, intellectual property is key when it comes to a lot of important decision-making processes. The company has regular cross-departmental meetings to assess patentability and direct research and development. For instance, when starting a new project, the company were able to use PatBase to look for potential investment opportunities by generating a snapshot of the technology field to find the right companies to approach, and the right companies to watch out for! This was a useful alternative to using expensive outsourcing companies to produce the same information.

One of their most used features are PatBase Folders, especially the ability to add notes and share these folders (even with non-PatBase users). When reviewing large result sets, it can feel very laborious having to go through the full claims and examples. Being able to add these result sets to folders and break up the time spent reviewing can make the process feel less overwhelming. When search queries have come back with extremely large result sets, the users will often reach out to the Minesoft Support team or their Account Manager to help find a way to reduce the size of the data set and make it more manageable, without losing important results.

Another popular feature is the quality checked data in PatBase, particularly when it comes to assignee names. Previously when they were using a free database, they found that they wouldn’t be able to find the full portfolio of patents from a company, probably due to variations in the company name in patent applications. With PatBase, they can trust that the full portfolio is available to search.