Platform overview

In the last decade, many companies and research laboratories have relied on either in vitro techniques or immunization of transgenic strains of mice to generate their monoclonals. It is now widely accepted that the resulting antibody repertoires suffer from a lack of diversity and other functional shortcomings. MAB Discovery understands that the best approach to creating a diverse population of monoclonals for candidate selection is to rely on the natural immune response and antibody maturation to create high affinity agents requiring no further optimization. Affinity optimization adds valuable time and cost to the project.

Discovery process

MAB Discovery employs a fully automated high throughput platform from immunization to recombinantly expressed hits, saving time and money. The immunogen can be a partially purified protein preparation or even whole cells or DNA.

Rabbits

  • Historically, rabbits are known to be excellent producers of high affinity and highly functional antibodies
  • Gene conversion as main mechanism for creating diversity
  • Robust and diverse immune response to a wide variety of immunogens (GPCRs, ion channels, small size epitopes)
  • Easy to produce cross-reactive reagents for tox studies

Rat

  • Similar to mouse as an established source of antibodies
  • VDJ recombination as the major mechanism for creating diversity
  • But suitable for multiple blood sampling to generate monoclonals with various characteristic

Immunization

  • Ensures antibody maturation in the presence of antigen
  • Works with recombinant proteins , peptides, partially purified protein preparations, whole cells or DNA
  • A driver of unlimited diversity: screen targets several times with no overlap in output

B cell cloning

  • Enables direct recovery of all antibodies
  • Independent of fusion efficiency of hybridomas
  • Increase hit rate versus conventional hybridoma techniques
  • Highly automated and fast