Discussion

The traditional method of generating antibodies, using hybridoma, is limited due to the poor efficiency of sampling the immune repertoire. UCB’s core antibody discovery platform combines high-throughput B cell culture screening, and the identification and isolation of single, antigen specific IgG-secreting B cells through a proprietary technique called the ‘fluorescent foci method. Using state of the art automation to facilitate screening, extremely efficient interrogation of the natural antibody repertoire is made possible; in fact, more than one billion immune B cells can now be screened to identify the rare therapeutic antibody candidates, which meet the many stringent selection criteria.
The talk will describe the design, construction and commissioning of a bespoke automated screening platform for therapeutic antibodies. The platform provides efficiency savings and improvements in antibody quality. We will describe how it was linked through the process control software to the in house data handling systems to create a very efficient screening process.