Breakthroughs in Improving Antibody Affinity Maturation

Creative Biolabs is glad to release the unique antibody affinity maturation service for antibody affinity maturation improvement.

As we know, antibodies are used extensively in diagnostics and as therapeutic agents. Achieving high-affinity binding is crucial for expanding detection limits, extending dissociation half-times, decreasing drug dosages and increasing drug efficacy. In order to conquer the shortages of common antibodies, Creative Biolabs developed antibody affinity maturation service.

"We’ve gained extensive experience in antibody affinity maturation over the years. We use scFv as the antibody format and monovalent display phagemid as the system to reduce the avidity effects during antigen-binding screening", said Dr. Monica Müller, chief scientific officer of Creative Biolabs.

As Dr. Monica introduced, untargeted mutagenesis and oligonucleotide-directed mutagenesis are utilized to construct random or defined sub-libraries to introduce a large number of mutants of the original antibody. Antibody binders of higher affinity are then selected by increasing the screening stringency. By constructing a series of sub-libraries of a scFv/Fab antibody, its protocol allows increase of the affinity of the scFv antibodies from 10-8 to 10-9.

Untargeted Mutagenesis

It uses an error-prone PCR integrated DNA-shuffling approach to mutate main CDR regions during sub-library construction. If the potential of introducing immunogenic mutations to framework positions is not a concern, it usually uses this approach to create mutations at completely random positions across the entire VH and VL fragments.

Oligonucleotide-directed Mutagenesis

If the structure of the antibody/antigen complex is available or modeling the structure of the antibody/antigen is possible, certain positions can be randomized at a defined diversity to improve the affinity. It is able to create any sub-libraries to incorporate the defined mutations utilizing trimer codon technology.

Phage Display Antibody Library Screening

Subsequent library screening will fish out the antibody mutants that have high affinity. Two library screening strategies are available, "surface-panning" strategy and "solution-sorting" strategy. In the first "surface-panning" strategy, decreasing concentrations of antigen is surface immobilized. In the second "solution-sorting" strategy, it has two approaches, selection based on the equilibrium constant (Kd) and selection based on binding kinetics.

In addition to the three introduced above, Creative Biolabs has other approaches used, such as antibody affinity measurement and peptide affinity maturation. Besides, single domain antibodies affinity maturation and scFv affinity improvement are also available in Creative Biolabs.

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