AbD Serotec - Custom Recombinant Monoclonal Antibodies

AbD Serotec delivers custom monoclonal antibodies in just eight to ten weeks. These high-affinity antibodies are generated using the well-established MorphoSys HuCAL® GOLD recombinant monoclonal antibody technology.

ADVANCED COMBINATORIAL ANTIBODY LIBRARY - HUCAL® GOLD

In the HuCAL® GOLD library the structural diversity of the human antibody repertoire is represented by seven heavy chain and seven light chain variable region genes, giving rise to 49 synthetic human frameworks in the master library. Highly diversified genetic cassettes (CDRs - Complementarity Determining Regions), built by trinucleotide mutagenesis (TRIM) technology, are then superimposed on these frameworks to mimic the entire human antibody repertoire. More than 15 billion functional human antibody specificities in Fab format are already prefabricated and available in phage libraries.

AUTOMATED SCREENING

Antigens are immobilized for automated panning against antibody-displaying phage (AutoPan®). CysDisplay™ technology provides simple elution of high-affinity binders and reduces the number of potential candidates to several hundreds or thousands of sequences. These candidates are then screened in a robust 384-well ELISA (AutoScreen®). Positive clones are automatically forwarded for further validation, sequenced, and entered in the central database.

ANTIBODY FORMAT VARIATION

Antibodies are provided as either monovalent Fab fragments or bivalent Mini-antibodies (equivalent to F(ab')2 fragments), depending on the intended application. Bivalent mini-antibodies function exceptionally well in IHC, for example. All antibodies can also be genetically fused to a variety of common protein tags or fusion partners such as alkaline phosphatase.

DIVERSE ANTIGEN MATERIALS

The high-throughput automated screening technology requires only 0.5mg of purified protein for the complete panning and screening processes. Customers may also supply peptides, peptide sequences or haptens as antigens - or, if only coding DNA is available, protein antigens can be expressed and purified using our proprietary HuCAL®-EST technology. This technology is ideal for generating well-suited antigens and antibodies for targets that have not yet been isolated or fully expressed.

DIRECT SCREENING FOR EPITOPE- AND PHOSPHO-SPECIFIC ANTIBODIES

One advantage of the HuCAL® GOLD technology is that closely related antigens can be used as 'blockers' during the screening process to ensure that the selected antibodies are specific for the antigen of choice. This is ideal for the study of homologous proteins and protein variants, and for the generation of anti-idiotypic antibodies. The library also contains antibodies distinguishing between phosphorylated and non-phosphorylated peptides.

CUSTOMER-ORIENTED SERVICE

The HuCAL® GOLD technology has been used to generate antibodies against a wide variety of target antigens - from highly conserved proteins to hormones and phosphorylated peptides. However, in the rare case that Antibodies by Design fails to find an ELISA-positive antibody, there is no charge to the customer. Once the antibodies are delivered, AbD Serotec offers all customers a full satisfaction guarantee, which means that they will do whatever they can to ensure that customers are satisfied with their custom antibody purchase.

RELATIONSHIP TO MORPHOSYS AG

AbD Serotec is a division of MorphoSys, which provides rapid, high-throughput custom antibody reagent services to the academic and industrial markets for use in research. The company has full access to the MorphoSys technology and hopes to make the HuCAL® GOLD library the Gold Standard for antibody generation for research applications. An advantage for customers in the early phases of target research is that the antibodies provided by AbD Serotec can be easily transferred into collaboration with MorphoSys at any time, to further exploit the advantages of the technology in the development of therapeutics.