On June 11, 2021 HiFiBiO Therapeutics, a multinational biotechnology company with unique expertise in immune modulation and single-cell science, reported a publication in Science Advances with its collaborators at Nankai University, ShanghaiTech University, and Jiao Tong University about the development of a high-throughput droplet-based approach to identify novel antibodies with functional readouts beyond simple binding (Press release, HiFiBiO Therapeutics, JUN 11, 2021, View Source [SID1234583928]). Innovative therapeutics such as bispecific T-cell engager (BiTE) antibodies and agonist antibodies against costimulatory receptors can reach their full potential through such functional screening.
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This approach improves upon conventional screening by allowing for the analysis and screening of functional antibodies at the single-cell level with unprecedented throughput, allowing for more diverse candidates and successful hits. To demonstrate the technical capabilities of the platform, researchers successfully identified functional antibodies for CD40 agonism with low frequency (<0.02%) in two rounds of screening. Additionally, the versatility of the system was shown by combining an anti-Her2 x anti-CD3 BiTE antibody library with functional screening, enabling efficient identification of active anti-Her2 x anti-CD3 BiTE antibodies.
"Our single-cell microfluidic platform’s robustness and versatility has enabled the efficient and unbiased discovery of active antibodies with markedly increased throughput and accuracy," said Bingqing Shen, PhD, Director, Antibody Discovery of HiFiBiO Therapeutics. "We look forward to further leveraging our technology towards identification of functional antibodies for agonist and bispecific antibodies to ensure a sustainable pipeline of next generation novel immunotherapies."
"This technology addresses two main bottlenecks plaguing conventional screening methods for novel immunotherapies, namely, candidate functionality and diversity in a high throughput manner," said Professor Zhang, "Functional droplet-based screening enables direct linking of antibody discovery to functional outcomes which could optimize screening efforts significantly and accelerate the antibody drug discovery process. I can envision that the platform can be applied to screening of other types of molecules such as cytokines and to high-throughput analysis of cell-cell interactions. For example, dendritic cells expressing a library of neoantigens are co-encapsulated with tumor-infiltrating T cells to map the pairs of cognate antigens and T cell receptors (TCRs)."