An on-chip single B cell mining platform for rapid development of fully human therapeutic antibodies and for immunoprofiling human antibody responses

Monoclonal antibodies (mAb) are the biggest class of biopharmaceuticals used clinically against cancer, autoimmune diseases, inflammatory diseases, and several other clinical conditions. As of May 2018, 80 mAb products have been approved in the US or Europe for therapeutic use. The global mAb market shows continued growth and is estimated to reach $131.3 billion by 2023. The human mAb segment is predicted to have the strongest growth in the coming years due to their associated benefits. As the human immune system’s ability to generate unique and highly specific antibodies is unmatched by any artificial, man-made approach, several technologies have been or are being developed to harness the power of the human immune system for the generation of fully human monoclonal antibodies with high effector function and superior safety/stability/immunogenicity profiles. Guided by technical innovations in single cell separation and analysis, single B-cell screening followed by antibody gene amplification and transient expression in eukaryotic cells has emerged as a powerful technique to exploit the natural antibody repertoire. In addition, this technique may overcome limitations such as limited diversity and unnatural pairing of the heavy and light chains that are observed when using immortalization or display technologies respectively. In this valorisation-driven project, MeBioS and PharmAbs team up to continue their efforts to develop and validate an integrated microfluidic single B cell screening platform at KU Leuven. The platform has high potential as unique, fast and straightforward tool for therapeutic antibody development, but also constitutes an excellent research tool to study human antibody responses. The latter is important in vaccine research, autoimmune disease profiling and anti-drug antibody research.

Keywords:human monoclonal antibody, single B cell technology, immunoprofiling

Disciplines:Applied immunology