ChemPartner expanded our antibody discovery service offering to include b cell cloning in January 2019. The Beacon® platform is capable of screening thousands of plasma b cells from immunized animals, which speeds up a traditionally time-consuming hybridoma process.
Plasma b cells secreting antibodies of interest are selected based on cell- or bead-based binding and/or functional assays that are run serially or by multiplex format. Individual plasma b cells of interest are selectively exported for antibody sequencing. Using this platform, plasma b cells can be characterized in less than eight hours, thus accelerating the antibody discovery process.
B Cell Cloning on the Beacon® Platform
- Reduce antibody screening time from 8-12 weeks to one day while interrogating more of the immune repertoire
- Potential to immunize WT or transgenic strains of mice
- Identify plasma B cells from immunized mice with target specific binding and functional activity
- Demonstrated functional blocking of receptor/ligand interactions using PD-L1/PD-1 as test case
- Additional assays such as Ca Flux, cytokine secretion and T cell activation are under development
- Good rate of recovery of single VH/VL sequences from successfully exported plasma b cells
Beacon® Platform
OptoSelect™ Chip
Light manipulation + microfluidics
Single Cell Isolation in NanoPens™
Thousands in parallel
Single b cells are positioned on a chip housing thousands of sub-nL chambers called NanoPens using controlled patterns of light. Tens of thousands of single B cells can be isolated, cultured, and assayed for target specific binding and function