Antibody Screening & Characterization

Generating an antibody with dependable, predictable, and most importantly, intended performance is a long process that doesn't end with purification or even clonal selection. In order to understand and anticipate how your antibody will perform and interact in your application, antibody screening and characterization is fundamental.

In the context of Therapeutic Antibody Drug Discovery, screening and characterization is even more critical. From isotyping through affinity ranking, screening and characterizing monoclonal antibodies lays the groundwork for rational selection of lead candidates. GenScript's years of expertise and propriety high throughput technologies allow us to offer a suite of services covering all characterization and screening requirements. Best of all these services easily and seamlessly integrate with our custom antibody generation services. We can screen and characterize antibody drug lead candidates, revealing their essential attributes as follows. 

Key Antibody Characterizations
Epitope Binning: Group antibodies by the region on the target which they recognize, the epitope. By targeting specific epitopes, antibody selection can be directed towards site specific blocking or activation. Combining distinctly different epitopes allows for powerful assay generation such as capture ELISAs.

Affinity Ranking: Select for relative affinity through high throughput screening of thousands of antibodies simultaneously. Knowing the relative binding strength will help direct candidate selection to cover a wide range of affinities, or just the strongest, depending on your goals. 

EC50 and IC50: Determine the potency of your antibody by finding half the maximal effective concentration as an agonist (EC50) or half the maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) when used for competitive binding.

 
 
Cross-reactivity: Although highly specific, antibodies have the potential to bind to non-dominant or unintentional epitopes appearing similar to that of the antigen they were raised against. Negative screening against cross-reactivity serves to guide selection of appropriately specific clones before time, effort, and cost is wasted subcloning and expanding. 

Cell Based Screening: While ELISA and Western Blot assays are valuable tools for most targets, antibodies against cell surface antigens are best screened in their native context. High-throughput FACS provides both the speed and format necessary to discriminate between antibodies that recognize native structured surface antigens and those that do not.

Technology for Antibody Screening and Characterization

Our team of antibody development scientists have created a repertoire of proprietary screening technologies capable of fast and accurate antibody screening and characterization. Our technologies summarized below combine EC50 & IC50 measurements, epitope binning, ligand blocking capabilities, and cross reactivity in high-throughput formats to rationally select antibodies most suited to your goals.

Antibody Screening and Characterization Related Services

We provide antibody services including Therapeutic Antibody Drug Discovery Services, catering to every step in the process from lead generation, to optimization, and finally production at any scale. A few of our services include:

1. DNA immunization
2. High Throughput Gene to Antibody
3. Anti-idiotype Antibodies