Antibody Screening Solutions Made Easy - 28

Antibody Screening Solutions Made Easy * New Methods Improve Ab Engineering

No additional chemicals or viruses are required
with the MaxCyte process," explains James Brady,
Ph.D., vice president of technical applications and
customer support. Another advantage of Maxcyte's systems, according to Dr. Brady, is the ability to generate milligram to gram quantities of
protein via transient expression.
"Going to the time and effort of creating stably
transfected cells is not necessary when a transient transfection can yield gram quantities of
protein," he says. Systems developed by our company can be used with any cell line, any production process, and any media. This flexibility of our
system means that it can be used in a wide variety of experiments needed during the development of antibodies."
Another issue is the post-translational modification of antibodies. These modifications can vary
between cell types used to make the antibodies.
Dr. Brady adds that because cells that will be used
in manufacturing are easy to employ with the company's platform, differences in post-translational
modification introduced by the use of different cell
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lines is eliminated. Thus, says Dr. Brady, "data
generated on our platform are more relevant."

Automation Comes to Ab Cloning
At the conference, Kurt Klimpel, Ph.D., field application specialist, product development at SGI-DNA,
talked about the synthetic genomics. He said that
his company can automate cloning using a DNA
genomics workstation, BioXp™ 3200, which permits
hands-free, rapid, antibody library construction.
He cited as a case study the antibody engineering group at VIB in Belgium. The group designed
and assembled a family of nanobody sequences
using the BioXp instead of a traditional manual
workflow. The goal of the project was to clone 30
different DNA constructs into a VIB proprietary
expression vector.
"The conventional method for doing this involves
laboriously designing and ordering primers to
build the fragments for cloning into the first vector;
transforming this into bacteria, plating, picking
clones, using PCR amplify for verification, and

finally sequencing for confirmation-and this is
only the first half of the project. If all goes well,
this takes at least a month of dedicated time for
a molecular biologist," explains Dr. Klimpel.
The project involves submitting the desired
DNA sequences. From there, SGI-DNA designs the
oligonucleotides and other reagents, sending
these reagents on to the customer. The customer
then loads the reagents into their BioXpand runs
a customized overnight process that both creates
the doubled-stranded DNA (dsDNA) Tiles and
uses Gibson assembly to clone the de novo dsDNA
Tiles into the customer's desired final vector.
"The customer's hands-on-time for this process
is simply the five minutes it takes to load the
reagents and then press the start button. The
resulting cloned material is then used for transformation, plating, and sequencing of colonies
to verify correctness," continues Dr. Klimpel.
While the results are not perfect in every case,
the accuracy ranges around 85% to 98%, he says,

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