Antibodies continue to be developed as therapeutics for a variety of indications. Current methods of screening groups of antibodies typically focus on selecting for antibodies that bind to known proteins. Such selections can yield a large number of antibodies, few of which have therapeutically useful biological properties. Moreover, such antibodies are typically expressed as Fab or scFv fragments in prokaryotic or yeast systems. Most currently approved antibody therapeutics are, full-length antibodies, often human or humanized antibodies, that are usually expressed in mammalian cells. Therefore, development of therapeutic antibodies from libraries of antibodies typically involves a tedious, one-by-one conversion of selected antibody fragments to full-length antibodies. Subsequent testing of the full-length antibodies does not always yield results that correlate well with results obtained with the antibody fragments. The present invention presents a scheme for subjecting a moderately large group of multimeric, optionally Fc-containing, antibodies expressed by mammalian cells to a screen or a selection to directly identify antibodies that have a desired biological property.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds