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Phage-display technology for the production of recombinant monoclonal antibodies

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... 3,4 The difficulty in controlling stringency during binding causes many candidates from the enriched phage pools to represent false positives that fail in vitro validation. 5,6 An inability to recapitulate the low relative concentration and morphology of targets in vitro may also lead to candidates failing later during in vivo testing. 7 The stochastic nature of selection results in thousands of nonspecific clones, requiring further screening for elimination. ...
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Phage display is a critical tool for developing antibodies. However, existing approaches require many time-consuming rounds of biopanning and screening of potential candidates due to a high rate of failure during validation. Herein, we present a rapid on-cell phage display platform which recapitulates the complex in vivo binding environment to produce high-performance human antibodies in a short amount of time. Selection is performed in a highly stringent heterogeneous mixture of cells to quickly remove nonspecific binders. A microfluidic platform then separates antigen-presenting cells with high throughput and specificity. An unsupervised machine learning algorithm analyzes sequences of phage from all pools to identify the structural trends that contribute to affinity and proposes ideal candidates for validation. In a proof-of-concept screen against human Frizzled-7, a key ligand in the Wnt signaling pathway, antibodies with picomolar affinity were discovered in two rounds of selection that outperformed current gold-standard reagents. This approach, termed μCellect, is low cost, high throughput, and compatible with a wide variety of cell types, enabling widespread adoption for antibody development.
... The 3 + 3 system and 8 + 8 system is unique as it involves the concurrent use of a phagemid and helper phage. The foreign DNA fragments are fused to the pIII or pVIII gene in the phagemid whereas the helper phage supplies additional pIII or pVIII for phage packaging (Rajput et al., 2014;Rondot et al., 2001). ...
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The immune system is tasked to keep our body unharmed and healthy. In the immune system, B- and T-lymphocytes are the two main components working together to stop and eliminate invading threats like virus particles, bacteria, fungi and parasite from attacking our healthy cells. The function of antibodies is relatively more direct in target recognition as compared to T-cell receptors (TCR) which recognizes antigenic peptides being presented on the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). Although phage display has been widely applied for antibody presentation, this is the opposite in the case of TCR. The cell surface TCR is a relatively large and complex molecule, making presentation on phage surfaces challenging. Even so, recombinant versions and modifications have been introduced to allow the growing development of TCR in phage display. In addition, the increasing application of TCR for immunotherapy has made it an important binding motif to be developed by phage display. This review will emphasize on the application of phage display for TCR discovery as well as the engineering aspect of TCR for improved characteristics.
... polystyrene) and their subsequent propagation throughout each iteration. Methods to reduce NSB are available but can result in the loss of rare or desirable clones [21,22] Poor or non-existent soluble expression subsequent to selection-this is often attributed to the presence of what are deemed ''truncated" clones, with frame shifts or internal amber stop codons, which fail to bind to the antigen following initial selection [23,24] Competitive selection based on target affinity can result in the oversight of protein molecules with properties that are often incompatible with high affinity, such as agonists, partial agonists and antagonists, and modulators of target function [25] Selection bias-reports suggest phage display is biased against cysteine residues in odd numbers and residues which are at fixed positions or positively charged [26] Poorly folding molecules will still be displayed-this can result in clones which have poor expression/low yields and low stability being selected [27] Not amenable to multiplexing-libraries are generally screened against one antigen at a time Cloning by limiting dilution ...
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Microtools that have been developed to allow in depth interrogation of individual cells in high throughput are improving our understanding of biological processes at the single cell level and are opening up new possibilities for biological research. In relation to antibody discovery, these tools are now helping to maximise the full potential of well-established methodologies for antibody generation. Being complementary to both recombinant and native antibody secreting cells, some of these tools are finding widespread use in the field. In this review, we discuss how microtools for single cell analysis are addressing some of the limitations of traditional approaches for antibody screening. We describe the main classes of microtools for antibody discovery along with a comparison of each technology and an outlook for the future utility of some of these microtools for discovery and research.
... The occurrence of frequent flu outbreaks leads to large-scale socio-economic losses and calls for improvement in the production of reagents, in terms of large scale production, uniform quality, low cost, and stability for effective diagnosis and management of the disease. With the advent of upgraded technologies, rAbs have provided great advantages against the conventional monoclonal antibodies (28,29). Once developed, rAbs are economically one of the most feasible diagnostic and therapeutic agents and allow mass scale production. ...
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We have investigated the possibility of improving the yield of properly folded recombinant single chain Fv fragments (sFv) of an antibody by expressing the protein in stably transfected Drosophila melanogaster SC-2 cells. The DNA encoding the variable regions of the 1.2B6 anti-E-selectin antibody were used to generate a recombinant sFv. This construct was cloned into the pHEN1 vector for expression in Escherichia coli and the pRmHa-3 vector to generate stably transfected Drosophila SC-2 cell lines. Following expression in the bacterial system, and using standard refolding protocols to obtain active material, it was shown that the majority of the sFv formed non-covalent aggregates. In addition SDS-PAGE analysis indicated that even the monomeric material was heterogeneous. In contrast, expression of sFv in Drosophila SC-2 cell lines allowed purification of active sFv directly from the culture supernatant. Only a small proportion of the sFv formed aggregates, and the purified material was homogeneous as determined by SDS-PAGE. Thus the use of stably transfected insect cells has a number of potential advantages in expressing recombinant antibody fragments.
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The development of phage display technology has facilitated the development of many new and sometimes novel antibody based reagents for scientific research. However, present methods for selection from phage-sFv display libraries are limited to selection against purified antigens or ex vivo cells of known origin and phenotype. Existing methods therefore preclude the isolation of sFv against unknown molecules in their natural environment, where expression is complex and subject to diverse control mechanisms. Since such a complex environment is difficult to mimic in vitro, the development of an in vivo selection procedure would greatly enhance the selection from phage display antibody libraries and lead to the development of reagents against cell surface molecules in their natural environment. This would be particularly advantageous for isolation of sFv against vascular endothelium which can readily change phenotype when cultured and is believed to express molecules in a tissue specific manner and in response to different stimuli. We describe here the development of an in vivo selection procedure in the mouse and demonstrate its potential for the selection of sFv from a phage-sFv library. The target antigen for one sFv is expressed solely on the thymic endothelium, while the second, a 165–170 kDa molecule in present on both thymic endothelium and the perivascular epithelium.