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Making antibodies from scratch

Nature Biotechnology volume 28, pages 1176–1178 (2010)Cite this article

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Synthesis and screening of a small library of antibody fragments yields promising hits.

Screening large combinatorial libraries is standard procedure in small-molecule drug discovery but is not generally used to discover therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. The main obstacle is the prohibitive cost of library synthesis, as it has been believed that upward of 100 million unique antibodies would be needed. In this issue, Mao et al.1 overturn this conventional wisdom by showing that a library of only ∼10,000 antibody fragments, designed in silico and synthesized de novo, can yield new leads for several targets. Their results suggest that rational approaches for determining the relationships between the sequences and activities of a library of molecules can aid the search for new therapeutic antibodies.

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Figure 1: Strategy for the design, synthesis and screening of a spatially addressable library of antibody fragments.

Katie Vicari

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  1. J. Christopher Love is in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

    J Christopher Love

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  1. J Christopher Love
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Correspondence to J Christopher Love.

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The author declares no competing financial interests.

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Love, J. Making antibodies from scratch. Nat Biotechnol 28, 1176–1178 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1110-1176

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1110-1176

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