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Allan Capili is Senior Vice President of Discovery Technologies at Merida Biosciences, where he leads a group spanning antigen design, receptor-Fc engineering, antibody discovery, and developability. At Merida, he was part of the team that discovered MER511, a precision biologic for Graves’ disease. 

With more than eighteen years of experience in biologics drug discovery, Allan has held research leadership roles at several companies. At Triveni Bio, he contributed to the dual KLK5/7 inhibitor TRIV-509, and at Voyager Therapeutics he worked on the anti-tau antibody VY7523. Earlier in his career, at Scholar Rock and Biogen, his work included the pro-myostatin antibody Apitegromab, currently in late-stage development. 

Current treatments for antibody-mediated autoimmune diseases rely on broad immunosuppression or nonselective IgG depletion, leaving patients vulnerable to infection and often failing to achieve durable remission.  We report a modular Fc-fusion platform that selectively clears pathogenic autoantibodies while sparing total IgG, neutralizing autoantibodies and directing the resulting immune complexes for clearance via the inhibitory receptor FcγRIIB on liver sinusoidal endothelial cells.  Our lead candidate, MER511, a TSHR-Fc fusion for Graves’ disease, demonstrated rapid, receptor-dependent autoantibody depletion in humanized mouse models.  To extend the platform to primary membranous nephropathy, we engineered a PLA2R CysR-Fc fusion whose wild-type form showed poor half-life driven by nonspecific heparin interactions.  Combining structural analysis, protein design, and glycan engineering, we generated variants with reduced heparin binding and markedly improved pharmacokinetics while preserving patient autoantibody binding.  Together these results establish a precision-medicine strategy that pairs FcγRIIB-driven clearance with antigen engineering to provide targeted autoantibody depletion without systemic immunosuppression, generalizable across autoantibody-driven autoimmune indications.