PNNL

Abstract

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have an essential role in biomarker validation and diagnostic assays. A barrier to pursuing these applications is the reliance on immunization and hybridomas to produce mAbs, which is time-consuming and may not yield the desired mAb. We recommend a process flow for affinity reagent production that utilizes combinatorial protein display systems (eg, yeast surface display or phage display) rather than hybridomas. These systems link a selectable phenotype—binding conferred by an antibody fragment—with a means for recovering the encoding gene. Recombinant libraries obtained from immunizations can produce high-affinity antibodies (