Team:Potsdam Bioware

Project Description

Antibodies are versatile molecules for research and therapy and they are currently revolutionizing the market of biopharmaceuticals. To date, antibodies are generated in a laborious and time consuming manner. Either animal immunization followed by hybridoma technology or phage display is used to identify desired genes, which then need to be transferred to a production cell line such as CHO. We designed a streamlined workflow that incorporates all steps of antibody generation in CHO cells. Our plan is to stably transfect an antibody-fragment library in CHO cells. Antibody maturation is mimicked by further diversifying this library using the enzyme Activation-Induced cytidine Deaminase (AID), which is known to induce somatic hypermutation. Next, we plan to test and deploy a versatile and continuous viral selection system for clones producing the desired antibodies. Finally, we will try to employ a genetic switch to go from surface expression to soluble production of antibodies.