Recombinant antibodies for diagnostics and therapy against pathogens and toxins generated by phage display

Antibodies are valuable molecules for the diagnostic and treatment of diseases caused by pathogens and toxins. Traditionally, these antibodies are generated by hybridoma technology. An alternative to hybridoma technology is the use of antibody phage display to generate recombinant antibodies. This in vitro technology circumvents the limitations of the immune system and allows-in theory-the generation of antibodies against all conceivable molecules. Phage display technology enables obtaining human antibodies from naive antibody gene libraries when either patients are not available or immunization is not ethically feasible. On the other hand, if patients or immunized/infected animals are available, it is common to construct immune phage display libraries to select in vivo affinity-matured antibodies. Because the phage packaged DNA sequence encoding the antibodies is directly available, the antibodies can be smoothly engineered according to the requirements of the final application. In this review, an overview of phage display derived recombinant antibodies against bacterial, viral, and eukaryotic pathogens as well as toxins for diagnostics and therapy is given.