Discovery of diverse and functional antibodies from large human repertoire antibody libraries

Phage display antibody libraries have a proven track record for the discovery of therapeutic human antibodies, increasing the demand for large and diverse phage antibody libraries for the discovery of new therapeutics. We have constructed naive antibody phage display libraries in both Fab and scFv formats, with each library having more than 250 billion clones that encompass the human antibody repertoire. These libraries show high fidelity in open reading frame and expression percentages, and their V-gene family distribution, V-H-CDR3 length and amino acid usage mirror the natural diversity of human antibodies. Both the Fab and scFv libraries show robust sequence diversity in target-specific binders and differential V-gene usage for each target tested, supporting the use of libraries that utilize multiple display formats and V-gene utilization to maximize antibody-binding diversity. For each of the targets, clones with picomolar affinities were identified from at least one of the libraries and for the two targets assessed for activity, functional antibodies were identified from both libraries. (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.