BackgroundAntibody phage display is a proven key technology that allows the generation of human antibodies for diagnostics and therapy. From naive antibody gene libraries - in theory - antibodies against any target can be selected. Here we describe the design, construction and characterization of an optimized antibody phage display library.ResultsThe naive antibody gene libraries HAL9 and HAL10, with a combined theoretical diversity of 1.5×1010 independent clones, were constructed from 98 healthy donors using improved phage display vectors. In detail, most common phagemids employed for antibody phage display are using a combined His/Myc tag for detection and purification. We show that changing the tag order to Myc/His improved the production of soluble antibodies, but did not affect antibody phage display. For several published antibody libraries, the selected number of kappa scFvs were lower compared to lambda scFvs, probably due to a lower kappa scFv or Fab expression rate. Deletion of a phenylalanine at the end of the CL linker sequence in our new phagemid design increased scFv production rate and frequency of selected kappa antibodies significantly. The HAL libraries and 834 antibodies selected against 121 targets were analyzed regarding the used germline V-genes, used V-gene combinations and CDR-H3/-L3 length and composition. The amino acid diversity and distribution in the CDR-H3 of the initial library was retrieved in the CDR-H3 of selected antibodies showing that all CDR-H3 amino acids occurring in the human antibody repertoire can be functionally used and is not biased by E. coli expression or phage selection. Further, the data underline the importance of CDR length variations.ConclusionThe highly diverse universal antibody gene libraries HAL9/10 were constructed using an optimized scFv phagemid vector design. Analysis of selected antibodies revealed that the complete amino acid diversity in the CDR-H3 was also found in selected scFvs showing the functionality of the naive CDR-H3 diversity.

Antibody phage display is the most commonly used in vitro selection technology for the generation of human recombinant antibodies and has yielded thousands of useful antibodies for research, diagnostics, and therapy. The prerequisite for successful generation of antibodies using phage display is the construction of high-quality antibody gene libraries. Here, we give the detailed methods for the construction of human immune and naive scFv gene libraries.

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Since the development of therapeutic antibodies the demand of recombinant human antibodies is steadily increasing. Traditionally, therapeutic antibodies were generated by immunization of rat or mice, the generation of hybridoma clones, cloning of the antibody genes and subsequent humanization and engineering of the lead candidates. In the last few years, techniques were developed that use transgenic animals with a human antibody gene repertoire. Here, modern recombinant DNA technologies can be combined with well established immunization and hybridoma technologies to generate already affinity maturated human antibodies. An alternative are in vitro technologies which enabled the generation of fully human antibodies from antibody gene libraries that even exceed the human antibody repertoire. Specific antibodies can be isolated from these libraries in a very short time and therefore reduce the development time of an antibody drug at a very early stage.In this review, we describe different technologies that are currently used for the in vitro and in vivo generation of human antibodies.