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200+ recombinant antibodies to be engineered into new formats to advance research

Redcar, UK, December 3, 2019. Absolute Antibody Ltd., an industry-leading provider of recombinant antibody products and services, today announced a partnership with the Recombinant Antibody Network (RAN), a consortium of three expert centers at the University of Chicago, University of Toronto, and UC San Francisco (UCSF) with a common goal to generate recombinant antibodies at a proteome-wide scale.

Under the new partnership, select recombinant antibodies made by the Recombinant Antibody Network will be engineered into new formats and made available to a wider scientific audience via Absolute Antibody’s online reagents catalog.

The sequences and validation data for more than 200 antibodies directed to intracellular targets generated by the Recombinant Antibody Network have been licensed to Absolute Antibody by the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation on behalf of the RAN.

The collection includes antibodies against key transcription- and translation-regulating proteins, such as chromobox and bromodomain proteins, and other targets involved in important areas of biology research, including chromatin biology and infectious disease control.

Absolute Antibody will use the sequences and data to recombinantly produce the antibodies in a variety of engineered formats designed to enable new experimental possibilities.

The engineered recombinant antibodies will be added to Absolute Antibody’s online reagents catalog, where researchers worldwide can easily access them.

They will be offered in different species to readily enable co-labelling studies and in antibody fragment formats to reduce background in immunoprecipitation studies.

All the antibodies are defined at the amino acid level to ensure batch-to-batch reproducibility, high purity and low endotoxin levels.

“We’re excited to partner with the Recombinant Antibody Network, which has been visionary in its efforts to generate a comprehensive set of recombinant antibodies for biomedical research,” said Amelia Gibson, PhD, MBA, director of business development at Absolute Antibody.

“The Network shares our mission to further the availability of recombinant antibodies to advance scientific research, and we’re eager to bring this valuable collection of antibodies to a wider audience in newly engineered formats.”

To address the unmet need for an efficient pipeline for renewable antibody discovery, Anthony Kossiakoff, PhD, Otho S.A. Sprague professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the University of Chicago, co-founded the RAN with two other veterans from the former Protein Engineering Department at Genentech Inc. Sachdev Sidhu, PhD, now a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto, and James Wells, PhD, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry in the UCSF School of Pharmacy, teamed with Kossiakoff to make automated, large-scale antibody production a reality.

The RAN generates high quality non-animal derived recombinant antibodies from cloned synthetic genes that are selected for high performance.

“Our new partnership with Absolute Antibody significantly extends the reach of the recombinant antibodies developed at our three university sites,” said Kossiakoff.

“Our consortium is committed to generating and validating functional antibodies for protein targets across the human proteome, and by partnering with Absolute Antibody, these antibodies will reach scientists worldwide for use in new applications, to further their contribution to scientific progress.”