Off-rate screening for selection of high-affinity anti-drug antibodies.

The rapidly increasing number of therapeutic antibodies in clinical development and on the market requires corresponding detection reagents for monitoring the concentration of these drugs in patient samples and as positive controls for measurement of anti-drug antibodies. Phage display of large recombinant antibody libraries has been shown to enable the rapid development of fully human anti-idiotypic antibodies binding specifically to antibody drugs, since the in vitro panning approach allows for incorporation of suitable blockers to drive selection toward the paratope of the drug. A typical bottleneck in antibody generation projects is ranking of the many candidates obtained after panning on the basis of antibody binding strength. Ideally, such method will work without prior labeling of antigens and with crude bacterial lysates. We developed an off-rate screening method of crude Escherichia coli lysates containing monovalent Fab fragments obtained after phage display of the HuCAL PLATINUM® antibody library. We used the antibody drugs trastuzumab and cetuximab as antigen examples. Using the Octet® RED384 label-free sensor instrument we show that antibody off rates can be reliably determined in crude bacterial lysates with high throughput. We also demonstrate that the method can be applied to screening for high-affinity antibodies typically obtained after affinity maturation.

A novel reverse transduction adenoviral array for the functional analysis of shRNA libraries.

BACKGROUND: The identification of novel drug targets by assessing gene functions is most conveniently achieved by high-throughput loss-of-function RNA interference screening. There is a growing need to employ primary cells in such screenings, since they reflect the physiological situation more closely than transformed cell lines do. Highly miniaturized and parallelized approaches as exemplified by reverse transfection or transduction arrays meet these requirements, hence we verified the applicability of an adenoviral microarray for the elucidation of gene functions in primary cells. RESULTS: Here, we present microarrays of infectious adenoviruses encoding short hairpin RNA (shRNA) as a new tool for gene function analysis. As an example to demonstrate its application, we chose shRNAs directed against seven selected human protein kinases, and we have performed quantitative analysis of phenotypical responses in primary human umbilical vein cells (HUVEC). These microarrays enabled us to infect the target cells in a parallelized and miniaturized procedure without significant cross-contamination: Viruses were reversibly immobilized in spots in such a way that the seeded cells were confined to the area of the viral spots, thus simplifying the subsequent addressing of genetically modified cells for analysis. Computer-assisted image analysis of fluorescence images was applied to analyze the cellular response after shRNA expression. Both the expression level of knock-down target proteins as well as the functional output as measured by caspase 3 activity and DNA fractionation (TUNEL) were quantified. CONCLUSION: We have developed an adenoviral microarray technique suitable for miniaturized and parallelized analysis of gene function. The practicability of this technique was demonstrated by the analysis of several kinases involved in the activation of programmed cell death, both in tumor cells and in primary cells.

Human combinatorial Fab library yielding specific and functional antibodies against the human fibroblast growth factor receptor 3.

The human combinatorial antibody library Fab 1 (HuCAL-Fab 1) was generated by transferring the heavy and light chain variable regions from the previously constructed single-chain Fv library (Knappik, A., Ge, L., Honegger, A., Pack, P., Fischer, M., Wellnhofer, G., Hoess, A., Wölle, J., Plückthun, A., and Virnekäs, B. (2000) J. Mol. Biol. 296, 57-86), diversified in both complementarity-determining regions 3 into a novel Fab display vector, yielding 2.1 x 10(10) different antibody fragments. The modularity has been retained in the Fab display and screening plasmids, ensuring rapid conversion into various antibody formats as well as antibody optimization using prebuilt maturation cassettes. HuCAL-Fab 1 was challenged against the human fibroblast growth factor receptor 3, a potential therapeutic antibody target, against which, to the best of our knowledge, no functional antibodies could be generated so far. A unique screening mode was designed utilizing recombinant functional proteins and cell lines differentially expressing fibroblast growth factor receptor isoforms diversified in expression and receptor dependence. Specific Fab fragments with subnanomolar affinities were isolated by selection without any maturation steps as determined by fluorescence flow cytometry. Some of the selected Fab fragments completely inhibit target-mediated cell proliferation, rendering them the first monoclonal antibodies against fibroblast growth factor receptors having significant function blocking activity. This study validates HuCAL-Fab 1 as a valuable source for the generation of target-specific antibodies for therapeutic applications.