Drug Discovery Services

ELISA is a well-established biochemistry assay that uses a solid-phase enzyme immunoassay (EIA) to detect the presence of a substance in a liquid sample. The ELISA procedure involves at least one antibody with specificity for a particular antigen. After the antigen is immobilized, the detection antibody is added, forming a complex with the antigen. The detection antibody can be covalently linked to an enzyme, or can itself be detected by a secondary antibody that is linked to an enzyme through bioconjugation. The signal is developed by adding an enzymatic substrate to produce a visible signal, which indicates the quantity of antigen in the sample.

A high throughput approach allows for the screening of a significantly higher number of clones and improves the ability to find the optimal antibody for your application of interest. Our experienced team provides high-throughput screening by ELISA with a primary screening capability of 10,000 to 50,000 samples per assay.

ADMEbio services include high-throughput flow-cytometry based phenotypic screening of suspension cells using the Intellicyt™ screening system. Benefits of this method include the following:

• Analysis of both antigen binding and cross-reactivity simultaneously.
• Screening of targets within their natural conformation.
• Ability to test multiple cells lines simultaneously to accelerate the development process.

Many of our customer request additional biochemical characterization for their application of interest. For this purpose, we offer a number of assays including the following:

• Antibody isotyping: Determination of the class (e.g., IgG vs. IgM) and subclass (e.g., IgG1 vs. IgG2a) of a monoclonal antibody.
• Antibody a¬ffinity ranking: Whole IgG, scFv or Fab format K off ranking.
• Epitope binning/mapping: This competitive immunoassay is used to characterize and sort a library of monoclonal antibodies against a target protein. Antibodies against a similar target are tested against all other antibodies in the library in a pairwise fashion to see if antibodies block one another's binding to the epitope of an antigen. After each antibody has a profile created against all of the other antibodies in the library, a competitive blocking profile is reated for each antibody relative to the others in the library. Closely related binning profiles indicate that the antibodies have the same or a closely related epitope and are “binned” together.

Additional characterization services such as SPR-based affinity measurement or cell surface protein affinity estimation by FACS are also available upon customer request.

Monoclonal antibodies are ubiquitous in biomedical research and medicine and are used to fight, diagnose and research disease and to develop and test new drugs. They are also critical tools in basic research and drug discovery. It is well established that the ascites method of mAb production causes discomfort, distress, and pain to the animals involved, as many countries have effectively limited or banned it in favor of in vitro methods. Fortunately, synthetic antibodies called recombinant antibodies (rAbs) can be created using antibody genes made in a laboratory or taken from human cells. rAbs can be used in all applications in which traditional mAbs are used and have inherent advantages over their animal-derived counterparts as well.

The production of non-animal recombinant antibodies can be broken down into five steps:

(1) creation of an antibody gene library;
(2) display of the library on phage coats or cell surfaces;
(3) isolation of antibodies against an antigen of interest;
(4) modification of the isolated antibodies and
(5) scaled up production of selected antibodies in a cell culture expression system.

Recombinant antibodies represent an excellent alternative in custom antibody development within drug discovery and therapeutic research. ADMEbio offers recombinant antibody production services custom tailored to our customer's needs.

In many cases, production of quality antibody requires recombinant protein as antigen for immunization.

ADMEbio offers production of recombinant proteins in three different systems: bacteria, mammalian cells or baculovirus system. Depending on your antigen, we will be able to choose the best suitable expression system for you and produce recombinant protein for further antigen preparation and immunization.

In vitro functional assays are the key steps within the selection of biologically relevant and functionally potent therapeutic antibody candidates. ADMEbio offers a variety of basic functional assays such as cell migration/invasion, cell proliferation and apoptosis essential for further antibody characterization. Generation of stable cell lines is also available.

ADMEbio offers an antibody pair development service for “sandwich” ELISA applications. The sandwich ELISA measures antigens between two layers of antibodies (capture and detection antibody). The antigen to be measured must contain at least two antigenic epitope capable of binding to antibody, since at least two antibodies act in the sandwich. Either monoclonal or polyclonal antibodies can be used as the capture and detection antibodies in this system. The advantage of “sandwich” ELISA is that the sample does not have to be purified before analysis, while maintaining a high level of specificity.

Knowing the sequence of your monoclonal antibody is one of the essential steps in further antibody engineering and function optimization. ADMEbio offers sequencing services with customer-selectable requirements that can speed up your antibody development research.