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AbCellera finds and develops antibody-based medicines, both for its own pipeline and for biopharma partners.
AbCellera is a drug discovery company that hunts for antibodies — the tiny proteins your immune system uses to grab onto viruses and other invaders — and turns the best ones into medicines. It works both as a partner to other drug companies and, increasingly, on its own treatments.
The core of the business is a technology platform. Instead of testing antibodies one at a time in a lab, AbCellera takes blood samples from people who have fought off an infection or responded well to a vaccine, then uses high-speed machines and software to sort through millions of immune cells and pull out the rare antibodies that actually work. Partners pay AbCellera to run this search for them, plus fees and future payments if a drug succeeds. Customers choose it because the search is fast and broad, which matters when a disease is spreading and time is short. AbCellera became famous for its role in the fight against COVID-19. It discovered bamlanivimab, an antibody treatment for the virus, which it partnered with Eli Lilly to develop; the drug received emergency authorization in the United States in late 2020. That partnership made AbCellera profitable for a stretch and gave it a pile of cash. Today it has shifted toward building its own pipeline of antibody drugs for cancer, autoimmune conditions, and other hard-to-treat diseases, while still collecting partner-funded research fees.
The honest flip side: AbCellera is a small, cash-burning company with a modest revenue base and no big approved product of its own yet. Its fortunes depend on partners' programs succeeding and on its internal drugs working out — long shots with long timelines. It spends heavily on research and manufacturing capacity in Vancouver, betting its platform can turn more shots on goal into real medicines.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026