Networking antibody discovery

Responding to a call from the NIH Common Fund for big project ideas, a group of three prominent academics has developed a system for generating renewable antibodies on a large scale, and plans to use it to build antibodies to the entire proteome. The system has already sparked interest in industry, with Celgene Corp. cornering cancer and immunological diseases through a $25 million upfront payment for an option to license therapeutic candidates in those areas.

While antibodies have become a key tool in preclinical research as reagents and therapeutics, their production is still dominated by run-of-the-mill methods involving animals or cells, or in vitro systems based on phage display that only allow bench-scale processing. Together, those factors contribute to the high variability and poor reproducibility of antibodies, by limiting the supply and validation of any one batch...