Abstract

Efficient Mining of the Natural Antibody Repertoire – Next Generation Antibody Discovery

Daniel Lightwood, Director, UCB Pharma

Single B cell isolation methodologies have emerged as an important technology in the quest to identify high quality functional monoclonal antibodies to a range of different therapeutic targets, including those that are considered extremely challenging. Here we describe the use of a number of cutting-edge antibody discovery technologies to efficiently interrogate the B cell repertoire of immunised animals and humans to identify rare antibodies with desirable characteristics. We employ a high-throughput automated B cell culture screening platform to mine out the memory B cell repertoire and a novel fluorescence-based proximity secretion assay (“fluorescent foci” system) to sample the plasma cell repertoire in niches such as the bone marrow. More recently we have been developing a droplet microfluidic platform to enhance our ability to sample both the memory and plasma cell pool. We will describe these technologies and how we have applied them to several therapeutically relevant targets.