Antibodies

New look for antibody R&D: Driving a new aspect of clinical trials—speed.

Time, long the bane of the arduously-long clinical trial process, is getting a helping hand from an old lab mate: antibodies. Dr. Mark Esser, keynoting the 10th Annual World Vaccine Congress 2010 Conference in Chantilly, VA this April highlighted the ever increasing role of antibodies in bioresearch, underscoring “how antibody and functional biomarker assays can be implemented to accelerate Phase I, dose ranging, and Phase IV marketing of vaccine studies of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines.”

Another speed advocate, Tillman Gerngross, founder and CEO of Lebanon, NH-based Adimab, reported last February in Xconomy, “that he now uses a yeast-based model to synthesize hundreds of antibodies against a target in just eight weeks...compared with six to 18 months of labor with the traditional methods used in biotech labs around the world.” Since going to market after clinical trials can take upwards of 15 years in many cases, this new antibody speed lane to product discovery is a welcome sight.

Best-in-Class Antibody Producers Feature:

Top Considerations before Buying Antibodies:
 
Producers dedicated to constantly probe aspects of antibody quality and function, as in binding affinity, ability to produce at high titer, species cross-reactivity, and ligand competition, whereby new integration schemes might result in increased speed from target to therapeutic lead.

Key Producers:
 
1. United States Biological or USBio claims to provide the greatest selection of antibodies in the world supplies, some 100,000 antibodies, antigens, biochemicals, and biologicals, including custom services for monoclonal and polyclonal antibody production and conjugation. United States Biological's antibodies are tested in a variety of applications including Immuno-histochemistry, ELISA, Immuno-cytochemistry, Western Blot, Immunoprecipitation, and Flow Cytometry. The company's biochemical and immunology products and kits are used in a variety of scientific applications and settings, including genomic research, biotechnology, pharmaceutical development and the diagnosis of disease in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as research universities worldwide. The USBio product mix includes, agarose, albumin, amino acids, antibiotics, enzymes, bacteria and yeast media, and cell culture media.

2. AbD Serotec, the research antibody division of MorphoSys AG—a brand created in early 2006—develops novel antibodies for therapeutic, diagnostic and research applications, offering an inventory of more than 13,000 antibodies and immunological reagents, and markets its antibodies through Design, Biogenesis, Serotec, and Oxford Biotechnology. AbD Serotec also custom builds monoclonal antibodies from the MorphoSys HuCAL library, as well as offering antibody production and conjugation services. HuCAL, AbD Serotec's proprietary technology, generates fully human antibodies in just 8 weeks, allowing direct selection of antibodies which are epitope specific, or react with a single member of a highly conserved antigen group. AbD Serotec is active in the new growth area of providing anti-idiotype antibodies against existing antibody drugs and drug candidates to accompany preclinical and clinical development.

3. amsbio (founded in 1987 as  AMS Biotechnology Ltd.) offers a catalog of over 50,000 antibodies, plus custom polyclonal and monoclonal development services. amsbio also supplys an additional antibody product series that includes antibody microarrays, antibody sampler kits, immune-precipitation kits and stem cell antibodies. A global supplier of research products and custom services for biological and pharmaceutical research, amsbio, in addition to its antibody product line, also offers peptides, DNA, RNA, proteins, tissue blocks, assay kits, cell culture consumables, glycobiology reagents, apoptosis and DNA damage kits, cell migration and invasion assays, pre-cast gels, and zymolyase.

4. Positioning the company's mission as one that accelerates scientific discovery by marketing unique products in the forefront of science,  Novus Biologicals was organized to provide the biological research community with a mechanism for commercializing unique biological materials and to monitor scientific trends and to supply materials that serve those trends. In that pursuit, Novus Biologicals now offers over 10,000 antibodies to serve a wide array of research needs. According to company president, Karen Padgett, Novus Biologicals in 2001 had three employees and $1 million in sales; by January 2010, it had 35 employees, $10 million in sales, and had just opened a London office. In April, Novus partnered with SDIX, another biotechnology company with a specialty in antibodies, to market SDIX's proprietary Genomic Antibody Technology process that eliminates the need for protein or peptide antigens, thus removing antigen preparation activities from laboratory preparation.

5. Founded in 1990 by Dr. Joseph Chandler, Maine Biotechnology Services offers a complete array of antibody services, including hybridoma development, polyclonal antibody development, antibody production, purification and post processing. The hybridoma development program features a rapid immunization protocol and MultiPure technology that allows the customer to assess relative affinity, physical characteristics, and matched pair capability prior to subcloning. Maine Biotechnology Services also offers custom services in its cGMP facility for development of hybridoma, polyclonal antibodies, ascites and in vitro production and purification. As an alternative to the custom antibody development, the company also offers a limited antibody development package, called Academic Discovery Track, at an affordable rate to academic and research customers.

Antibody Production
Definition: Produced by white blood cells called a plasma cell, antibodies, also known as immunoglobulins, are gamma globulin proteins that are found in blood or other bodily fluids of vertebrates, are used by the immune system to help direct the appropriate immune response to identify and neutralize different type of foreign objects encountered in the body such as bacteria and viruses.  They are typically made of basic structural units—each with two large heavy chains and two small light chains.