Antibody Discovery Services
Biocytogen’s state-of-the art antibody discovery service platform significantly accelerates the timeline for therapeutic antibody discovery. Our humanized immunoglobulin mouse models and cutting-edge single B-cell cloning technology generate high-quality human antibody hits for your target within 8-10 weeks of immunization, making our platform both efficient and cost-effective.
Our antibody discovery and pharmacology experts can take your project from target discovery all the way to IND application.
Advantages of our platform
Expertise
Our team has successfully completed several hundred projects yielding thousands of antibody clones against a range of targets, including challenging targets, such as GPCRs/ion channels.
Flexibility
We offer flexible project design and planning to best suit your needs.
Advanced Technologies & Streamlined Workflow
Created with BioRender.com (2022).
Our antibody discovery service platform uses industry-leading technologies and best-in-class humanized mice to discover high-quality antibodies for your target. For each phase of your project, we will carefully customize the experimental and technologic approach to ensure the success of your application.
Our flagship RenMab™ mouse enables the in vivo generation of human antibodies with full VDJ diversity, low immunogenicity, and favorable developability. This minimizes the need for excessive rounds of late-stage antibody engineering and validation.
Use of Berkeley Lights’ Optofluidic platform allows for the rapid identification of antibody hits in weeks, rather than months.
Biocytogen’s humanized mouse models allow for in vivo efficacy screening for antibody leads and candidates targeting immune checkpoints and cytokines/cytokine receptors.
Our Discovery Workflow
Antigen Design, Species selection, and Immunization
The success of your antibody discovery project depends on the immune response to your antigen. Antigens must be properly designed for maximum immunogenicity. We will design and synthesize antigen for you, or we can start with antigen prepared by your team. Read more about the types of antigens and advanced immunization strategies here.
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Model Choice
Our antibody discovery platform primarily supports in vivo discovery of antibodies produced in immunized mice. However, we also have expertise in human PBMC antibody discovery.
For fully human antibody generation, we strongly recommend licensing the use of our RenMab/RenLite or RenMab/RenLite HiTS strains. Use of these humanized mice can accelerate the development of high-quality monospecific, bispecific, or multispecific antibodies for even difficult targets.
For bioanalytical, anti-idiotype, surrogate or other applications that do not require fully human antibody discovery, we can immunize your preferred strain of wild-type mice.
For human biomarker antibodies, diagnostic antibodies or therapeutic antibodies for infectious or autoimmune/inflammatory disorders, we also have expertise screening human PBMCs from patients.
Hit Generation
Our antibody discovery service platform utilizes cutting-edge technologies to achieve real-time, single cell resolution of the screening process. Antigen-specific B cells are captured with efficiency and accuracy, without compromising throughput.
From the animals that respond best to immunization, we will isolate lymphoid tissue and identify antibodies produced by individual B cells that have high affinity for your target. The positive cells are then captured and sequenced for further analysis.
At Biocytogen, the industry-leading Beacon Optofluidic Technology is used in the majority of therapeutic antibody discovery applications to rapidly identify your antibody sequences of interest. For some challenging targets, FACS-based B-cell isolation can be used in combination with the Beacon platform to screen a variety of B cell subpopulations for hit generation, allowing for the maximum diversity of antibody clones.
Lead Characterization
Lead Characterization involves further functional screening of antibody leads. In addition to secondary and tertiary screens, the biochemical and biophysical properties of antibody leads will be assessed to determine their developability. Our pharmacology experts will use both in vitro and in vivo platforms to provide comprehensive PK/PD (pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic) profiling and in vivo efficacy assessments.
Candidate Selection
At this phase in the discovery process, the top-performing antibody candidate(s) will ideally demonstrate maximum efficacy, safety, stability, and tolerability in preclinical models. A panel of experts across multiple disciplines will usually assess whether the candidate(s) will be suitable for clinical development.
Our Service Scope
Biocytogen’s scientific expertise, advanced in-house technologies, and best-in-class animal models means that our team can deliver high-quality antibodies for your desired target with minimum risk and maximum efficiency.
While our platform is chiefly designed to accelerate therapeutic antibody discovery, we also offer antibody generation services for other specialized applications, including bioanalytical, anti-idiotype, and surrogate antibodies.
Contact us to set up a free consultation to learn more about our comprehensive services.
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Therapeutic antibodies
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Fully human antibody hits generated in our RenMab™/RenLite™ models undergo in vivo natural selection, which streamlines the selection of monoclonal antibody drug candidates with high therapeutic potential.
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Human PBMC-derived antibodies
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For projects that require screening human B cells from patient populations, we offer screening services for human PBMC antibody discovery. These antibodies could be useful for diagnostic or therapeutic applications, particularly in the fields of infectious disease or autoimmune disease.
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Anti-idiotype antibodies
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Anti-idiotype antibodies detect the CDR region of your antibody, and can be specifically designed to detect the levels of free and/or bound antibody. We can help to generate antigen-blocking or non-blocking anti-idiotype antibodies to determine the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties of your antibody leads.
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Surrogate antibodies
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For antibody targets with low homology between human and mouse, we can generate a surrogate antibody targeting the murine antigen for preclinical validation studies. For some common immuno-oncology targets, we have generated humanized mice to circumvent this step.
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Bispecific/multispecific antibodies
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Antibody hits generated in vivo in our RenLite™ model can be rapidly engineered for bispecific/multispecific antibody development.
Advantages of bispecific/multispecific antibodies
Engineering of antibodies to detect two (or more) targets significantly accelerates the clinical development of what would otherwise be a combination therapy. Moreover, multispecific antibodies have the potential to promote synergy and efficacy in treating cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Customized valencies
We can engineer sequences for bispecific/multispecific antibody production in both asymmetric and symmetric formats.
Benefits
Because the RenLite™ model contains only one Vk and one Jk gene, the light chain sequences of your antibodies after affinity maturation should remain biochemically compatible. This eliminates the inefficiencies associated with light-chain mispairing during discovery and scale-up production, pushing your top candidates into development much faster than with quadroma technology.
We are currently offering bispecific antibody development for partners licensing our RenLite model. For other applications, contact us to discuss your specific needs.
Our Recent Success
After screening over 200 antibodies that demonstrated strong binding to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, our team identified two leading antibodies targeting distinct epitopes for cocktail therapy candidates. Compared with single use, the effect of the combination treatment synergized to neutralize the virus in preclinical in vivo efficacy studies. Read more about this cocktail therapy here.
