BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

MAB Discovery: Monitoring maturation

MAB Discovery samples rat, rabbit blood over time to create antibody candidates

April 8, 2013 7:00 AM UTC

MAB Discovery GmbH is using wild-type animals and blood samples collected at multiple time points during antibody maturation to generate diverse sets of antibodies with high selectivity and affinity for a target antigen. The company says its mAb discovery platform can yield more high-quality candidates against a target than comparable in vivo platforms, which generally use transgenic animals and samples collected toward the end of the maturation phase.

MAB Discovery's platform involves immunizing wild-type rats and rabbits and bleeding them at multiple time points as the host immune response develops and evolves against the target antigen. B cells are isolated from these samples, cloned and then screened in high throughput for the expression of antibodies that bind to the target antigen. The variable regions of the antibodies are then cloned and expressed as chimeric antibodies in mammalian cell systems...