High-throughput antibody generation and characterization

A phage display library has been constructed containing over 1010 human antibodies, allowing the large-scale generation of antibodies. Over 38,000 recombinant antibodies against 292 antigens were selected, screened and sequenced, and 4,400 resultant unique clones characterized further.

Background: Isolation of recombinant antibody fragments from antibody libraries is well established using technologies such as phage display. Phage display vectors are ideal for efficient display of antibody fragments on the surface of bacteriophage particles. However, they are often inefficient for expression of soluble antibody fragments, and sub-cloning of selected antibody populations into dedicated soluble antibody fragment expression vectors can enhance expression.

The contributions of this author are as follows: conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper. Dr. Cécile Martin should also be included in the Funding section. The correct Funding information is as follows: This work was supported by Kyowa Hakko Kirin Co., Ltd. Japan (http://www.kyowakirin.com/index.html). All named authors are or were employees of Kyowa Kirin Pharmaceutical Research, Inc. or Kyowa Hakko Kirin Co., Ltd., Japan at the time of their involvement in the reported study. Kyowa Hakko Kirin Co., Ltd., Japan provided funding for the research of the study and provided support in the form of salaries for authors SK, TO, SB, RC, BG, TK, GD, CM, JL, LK, TT, and YK, but no individuals employed by the funder, other than the named authors, had any additional role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the 'author contributions' section.