Overview
This case study highlights how Excelra designed a immune repertoire data analysis pipeline to support high-throughput antibody discovery in a cloud environment. By combining scalable workflow orchestration, advanced bioinformatics solutions, and reproducible computational practices, Excelra enabled efficient processing of massive NGS datasets and accelerated insights into immune repertoire diversity.
Our client
The client partnered with Excelra to strengthen their antibody therapeutics discovery capabilities. Operating in a highly competitive biopharma research landscape, they required reliable scientific informatics services and cloud-ready pipelines to analyze immune repertoire sequencing data at scale.
Client’s challenge
Immune repertoire sequencing generates hundreds of millions of reads across multiple experimental rounds. The client lacked a unified immune repertoire data analysis pipeline capable of handling this scale while ensuring reproducibility, customization, and clear data interpretation. Publicly available workflows did not meet their throughput or reporting requirements, limiting the efficiency of clone enrichment and antibody discovery workflows.
Client’s goals
The primary objective was to build a robust, cloud-enabled immune repertoire data analysis pipeline that could process diverse NGS datasets efficiently. The pipeline needed to support scalable analysis, customized processing options, and intuitive reporting to aid downstream interpretation and decision-making in antibody discovery programs.
Our Approach
To ensure reproducibility and scalability, Excelra implemented the pipeline using the Snakemake workflow manager. This approach aligns with best practices in bioinformatics workflow management and enabled parallel processing of large-scale immune repertoire datasets.
By extending beyond standard public pipelines, Excelra incorporated optimized algorithms and customized analytics modules to increase throughput and efficiency. Integrated data visualization and reporting components allowed users to easily interpret clone enrichment patterns across multiple rounds of biopanning—an essential step in novel antibody identification. Secure execution and scalability were supported through cloud enablement services.
Our Solution
The delivered immune repertoire data analysis pipeline generated comprehensive, customer-friendly reports summarizing clone frequencies, enrichment trends, and diversity metrics. The workflow supported large-scale NGS data processing while maintaining consistency and traceability, aligning with FAIR data principles and modern computational biology services.
Result
The pipeline enabled rapid processing of enormous immune repertoire datasets and significantly improved analysis throughput. With faster identification of enriched clones, the client accelerated discovery of novel antibodies and gained a competitive advantage in antibody therapeutics development. The scalable architecture also allows future extension to additional immune profiling and biomarker discovery workflows.
Conclusion
This project demonstrates Excelra’s ability to build high-performance, scalable immune repertoire data analysis pipelines tailored to complex antibody discovery use cases. By combining workflow automation, cloud computing, and deep bioinformatics expertise, Excelra empowered the client to transform raw sequencing data into actionable insights—supporting faster, data-driven innovation in immunology research.
