Original Date of Webinar: Dec 14, 2022
Speakers: Lucy Liu, Ph.D. and Derek Croote, Ph.D.
Although it is highly rewarding to create medicines, particularly therapeutic antibodies, doing so comes with several risks. It is expensive, time-consuming, and often has a high failure rate. As such, any technique that can minimize costs and time while also increasing success is considered the holy grail in biotechnology.
Coupled with advances in liquid handling, bioinformatics, and antibody expression and characterization, high-throughput surface plasmon resonance (HT-SPR) and single-cell B-cell receptor sequencing (BCR-seq) are driving the unprecedented scale, scope, and speed of biologics development. We will discuss antibody discovery by immunizing transgenic mice engineered to produce antibodies with human variable region heavy and light chains, and by using high-throughput B cell selection employing single cell sorting, Beacon®, or Nanovial Technology. These workflows maintain native pairings and output a diverse final set of binders encompassing a variety of clonotypes and heavy and light chain genes.
HT-SPR enables the evaluation of the largest of antigen-antibody interactions quickly and cost-effectively. It can also run parallel kinetic, affinity, and epitope specificity studies from the very start of the drug discovery process. scRNA-seq is a versatile tool for understanding cell types, cell states, and developmental trajectories in a diverse range of tissues and organisms. Increasingly, it is being harnessed to understand adaptive immune responses and facilitate a new paradigm of drug discovery.