Services and Technologies

Services and Technologies

Our Services

We provide access to technology platforms to facilitate the selection of highly specific and sensitive monoclonal antibodies through commercial contracts, academic collaborations or PhD training. 

Facility services include:

  • Monoclonal antibody generation using phage display libraries
  • Bespoke antibody library construction from immunised sources
  • Antibody reformatting and expression in bacterial and mammalian systems
  • Developing in vitro diagnostic assays and cell based functional assays for antibody validation and ranking

We are also working with our research partners at the “cutting-edge” of biologics drug discovery: developing bispecifics, antibody drug conjugates, CAR-T therapies. In addition, we have several diagnostic antibody programmes developing rapid, easy-to use-and low-cost test kits for the timely diagnosis or detection of bacterial/viral infections (including Sars-Cov2), lethal algal toxins in drinking water and snakebite envenoming.

Our Technologies

A technology platform that consists of a portfolio of large naïve human antibody libraries (over 100 billion unique clones) and in-house antibody reformatting vectors.

Our expertise extends beyond the use of naïve libraries to the generation of bespoke libraries from immunised sources including -  human, sheep, goat, camel, rabbit, rat, mouse, chicken.

The powerful combination of our ability to capture antigen specific immune response in multiple species, phage display based enrichment of desired binders and antibody engineering skills has enabled the generation of novel antibodies with the following characteristics:

  • Super sensitivity binders to difficult / immunologically inert antigens
  • Recognition of surface exposed epitopes of microbial cell wall proteins
  • Cell internalisation and the binding of regions exposed during vesicle recycling 
  • Recognition of numerous epitopes spanning the entire length of the target protein
  • Species specificity or species cross-reactivity

These biological ligands can be used in a number of applications including:

 

SBF Reformatting vectors

Utilising a range of in-house developed tools and techniques, the facility has established a number of “plug and play” antibody expression vectors, which allow for rapid reformatting and site-specific modification of selected antibody fragments. These expression vectors facilitate the smooth transition of any therapeutic/diagnostic program from discovery to development, by fast tracking the lead to candidate selection process.

Positive phage binders isolated from antibody libraries can be reformatted into scFv, soluble single chain antibody (scAb) fragments, Fabs, fully human or mouse monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), or species chimaeras (eg mouse Fc and sheep binding sites) using our in-house vectors.

Reformatted antibody fragments and mAbs can be produced in bacterial or mammalian expression systems for various biochemical and biophysical characterisations, functional assays and in vivo models.