Andrew Tsourkas
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Title: Rapid production of bispecific antibodies using ‘off-the-shelf’ IgG
Biography
Biography: Andrew Tsourkas
Abstract
All current bispecific antibody platforms require antibody engineering and cloning up front to generate each new formulation. While made to order genes, advanced expression systems and new high efficiency cloning techniques can simplify and accelerate this process; the final products will frequently exhibit a loss of specificity, aggregation, light chain swapping, heterogeneity, etc. For many academic labs, this creates a barrier to entry into the field of bispecifics and for industry this limits the throughput of bispecific antibody production. Recently, we developed a simple method to site specifically and covalently attach an anti-CD3 single chain variable fragment (scFv) to any off-the-shelf, full length human Immunoglobulin G (IgG). This approach to making bispecific antibodies does not require antibody engineering, cloning or modifications. As a result, we can prepare libraries of bispecific antibodies with high purity in just a few hours. As proof of principal, we created a small library of eight bispecific antibodies simultaneously. IgG binding affinity was not affected by attachment of scFv to each heavy chain and T-cell mediated cell lysis assays confirmed potencies that were comparable to other bispecific antibody platforms.
