The downstream processing of proteins remains the most significant cost in protein production, and is largely attributed to rigorous chromatographic purification protocols, where the stringency of purity for biopharmaceutical products sometimes exceeds 99%. With an ever burgeoning biotechnology market, there is a constant demand for alternative purification methodologies, to ameliorate the dependence on chromatography, while still adhering to regulatory concerns over product purity and safety. In this article, we present an up-to-date view of bioseparation, with emphasis on magnetic separation and its potential application in the field. Additionally, we discuss the economic and performance benefits of synthetic ligands, in the form of peptides and miniaturized antibody fragments, compared to full-length antibodies. We propose that adoption of synthetic affinity ligands coupled with magnetic adsorbents, will play an important role in enabling sustainable bioprocessing in the future.

Although humanized antibodies have been highly successful in the clinic, all current humanization techniques have potential limitations, such as: reliance on rodent hosts, immunogenicity due to high non-germ-line amino acid content, v-domain destabilization, expression and formulation issues. This study presents a technology that generates stable, soluble, ultrahumanized antibodies via single-step complementarity-determining region (CDR) germ-lining. For three antibodies from three separate key immune host species, binary substitution CDR cassettes were inserted into preferred human frameworks to form libraries in which only the parental or human germ-line destination residue was encoded at each position. The CDR-H3 in each case was also augmented with 1 ± 1 random substitution per clone. Each library was then screened for clones with restored antigen binding capacity. Lead ultrahumanized clones demonstrated high stability, with affinity and specificity equivalent to, or better than, the parental IgG. Critically, this was mainly achieved on germ-line frameworks by simultaneously subtracting up to 19 redundant non-germ-line residues in the CDRs. This process significantly lowered non-germ-line sequence content, minimized immunogenicity risk in the final molecules and provided a heat map for the essential non-germ-line CDR residue content of each antibody. The ABS technology therefore fully optimizes the clinical potential of antibodies from rodents and alternative immune hosts, rendering them indistinguishable from fully human in a simple, single-pass process.antibody | paratope | plasticity | humanization | immunogenicity

This protocol describes the design and development of recombinant monovalent antigen-binding molecules derived from monoclonal antibodies through rapid identification and cloning of the functional variable heavy (VH) and variable light (VL) genes and the design and cloning of a synthetic DNA sequence optimized for expression in recombinant bacteria. Typically, monoclonal antibodies are obtained from mouse hybridomas, which most often result from the fusion of B lymphocytes from immunized mice with murine myeloma cells. The protocol described here has previously been exploited for the successful development of multiple antibody-based molecules targeting a wide range of biomolecular targets. The protocol is accessible for research groups who may not be specialized in this area, and should permit the straightforward reverse engineering of functional, recombinant antigen-binding molecules from hybridoma cells secreting functional IgGs within 50 working days. Furthermore, convenient strategies for purification of antibody fragments are described.

A sensitive, rapid, and label free magnetic bead aggregation (MBA) assay has been developed that employs superparamagnetic (SPM) beads to capture, purify, and detect model proteins and the herpes simplex virus (HSV). The MBA assay is based on monitoring the aggregation state of a population of SPM beads using light scattering of individual aggregates. A biotin-streptavidin MBA assay had a femtomolar (fM) level sensitivity for analysis times less than 10 minutes, but the response of the assay becomes nonlinear at high analyte concentrations. A MBA assay for the detection of HSV-1 based on a novel peptide probe resulted in the selective detection of the virus at concentrations as low as 200 viral particles (vp) per mL in less than 30 min. We define the parameters that determine the sensitivity and response of the MBA assay, and the mechanism of enhanced sensitivity of the assay for HSV. The speed, relatively low cost, and ease of application of the MBA assay promise to make it useful for the identification of viral load in resource-limited and point-of-care settings where molecular diagnostics cannot be easily implemented.