The History of MesoBio

MesoBio is a tradename of the company Antibodies for Research Applications BV (ARA) since 2024. This company was founded in May 2000 by the current managing director, Peter J. K. Kuppen, PhD. He is an experienced biomedical scientist at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands and has developed several new antibodies, specific for research. This led to founding of the company ARA to offer such useful antibodies to a broad research community. In 2023, ARA extended its services with customized peptides for research applications, based on an OEM agreement. In 2024, MesoBio was established, and the product range was further extended with many antibodies, based on an OEM agreement. The aim of the company is to offer antibodies to the research community at an affordable and competitive price.

Research projects

Clinical Applications of Antibodies and Peptides

Apart from applications in research, antibodies and peptides proved to be useful for clinical applications, both as diagnostic tools and as therapeutical agents. Therefore, in 2009 the company broadened its activities and started to participate in projects that aimed to develop antibodies and for image-guided oncological surgery. These projects are focused on enabling better visualization of tumor tissue for surgeons during surgery. The reason is that current cancer surgery in many cases leads to incomplete tumor removal due to poor visibility of tumors for surgeons during the operation. The projects where ARA initially was involved focused on antibodies as a tool for tumor visualization. Recently, the focus was switched to peptides as targeting vehicle to visualize tumor tissue during surgical resection. The reason is that tumor-targeting peptides are much faster and cheaper to develop than antibodies. The Dept. of Surgery has developed in cooperation with ARA BV a workflow that will result in a toolbox of tumor-targeting peptides and enable visualization of all tumors (carcinomas) of all patients.

Public-Private Partnership

Two projects have been granted to develop this toolbox: PanPeptide (focus on rectal cancer, KWF-Health Holland) and ImPact (focus on esophageal cancer, LUMC-Health Holland). Both projects are public-private partnerships and are a close collaboration between LUMC, Dept. of Surgery (Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, CHDR (Center for Human Drug Research, Leiden, The Netherlands), Euretos (Utrecht, The Netherlands, LACDR (Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research, University of Leiden, The Netherlands) and ARA BV. The LUMC Dept. of Surgery (Dr Alexander Vahrmeijer) are in the lead of both projects.