Discussion

IONTAS uses its proprietary technology to accelerate all aspects of antibody drug discovery from target selection through to the production and purification of large quantities of fully human antibody pre-clinical candidates. Several case studies will be presented leading to the identification of functionally active antibodies or antibodies useful for the study of signalling networks. Key to selection success is the preparation of correctly folded native target protein, access to a high quality human antibody phage display library and the development of appropriate high throughput screening assays. Time resolved fluorescence assays (DELFIA and HTRF) are employed in lead isolation to rapidly identify binding hits in primary screening. Lead candidates are then optimised by multi-parallel affinity maturation and secondary screening. Functional antibodies may also be selected by cell phenotypic screening and an example of an in-cell expression and reporting (ICER) system will be presented to identify antagonistic antibodies for FGF4 and FGFR1β signalling in stem cells.