An Antibody Engineering Platform for High Throughput Candidate Screening, Engineering & Optimization

PEGS Boston, Boston, MA, USA
April 8, 2019

Antibodies and next-generation biotherapeutics play an increasingly important role for the development of new medicines, and are key to AbbVie’s growing biologics product portfolio. Antibody discovery and engineering at AbbVie is supported by different in vitro display technologies, all of which lead to very significant antibody library diversities and size (> 1010 clones) that need to be tracked throughout high-throughput (HT) screening and optimization. For this, we have implemented a significant laboratory automation platform to increase the throughput for testing and optimizing large numbers of candidate molecules. A key component that was needed for our HT platform was a scalable workflow system to track all data along the discovery process and facilitate the identification of the most promising antibody candidates. Here, we describe the implementation of Genedata Biologics™ to support multiple technology antibodies discovery and engineering platforms. This new workflow system enables a significant increase in throughput in the generation and testing of optimized antibody molecules by improving data capture, management, integration, and analysis of sequence and assay data. We show that both process efficiency as well as result quality improved. Concrete use cases illustrate examples from yeast, phage and mRNA display, and other antibody discovery technologies.