Pedro Paz

I lead the Immunogenicity function at Xaira Therapeutics, a role I took on in October 2025 to build the function from early-stage concept into a fully operational team with dedicated wet lab capabilities. Our focus is ensuring that immune responses to de novo designed biotherapeutics are identified, understood, and managed before they become clinical liabilities. De novo proteins — full length antibodies, bispecifics, VHH nanobodies, minibinders, and peptidomimetics — present a genuinely different challenge from optimized or biosimilar antibodies: no clinical immunogenicity benchmarks, no established comparators, and structural novelty that most preclinical tools were not designed to address. To meet that challenge, we developed XIRAM — the Xaira Immunogenicity Risk Assessment and Management framework — a tiered, stage-gated process integrating in silico T cell epitope profiling, MHC II peptide proteomics (MAPPS), DC:T cell co-culture functional assays, pre-existing ADA screening, and innate immune cytokine profiling, from earliest candidate selection through IND-enabling activities and into the clinic.Across these programs — spanning oncology and autoimmune indications — each modality presents distinct immunogenicity questions driven by novel targets, non-germline sequences, and patient immune contexts that standard risk frameworks were not built to capture. As we scale the team and build out the dataset, our ambition extends beyond risk assessment: to develop predictive models, informed by the clinical and preclinical data we are generating, that could actively guide molecule design toward lower immunogenic potential from the outset. That is the longer-term direction we are working toward, and it is the kind of problem that makes this space worth being in.#Immunogenicity #Biotherapeutics #TCellEngagers #DeNovoProteinDesign #ADA #Oncology #XairaTherapeutics