Phage Display Antibody Libraries for Antibody Discovery

Antibody engineering advances have allowed for the fastest, most diverse, and optimized antibody discovery. Traditional phage display libraries, along with long-established immunization approaches such as transgenic models and hybridomas, take too long and often don’t yield enough hits. Charles River’s antibody discovery platform enables rapid discovery, reducing time and resources spent on finding, characterizing, and optimizing your hit.

The Many Advantages of our scFv Discovery Services and Phage Display Libraries

  • Diversity for challenging targets. We can deliver therapeutic leads against the hardest targets, including GPCRs, ion channels, peptide-MHC complexes, allosteric modulators, human/cyno/mouse cross-reactive epitopes, anti-idiotypics, and biepitopic antibodies.
  • Pre-optimized libraries for therapeutic antibody development. Our scFv phage display libraries have been rigorously optimized to yield clones with desirable therapeutic characteristics. Built from nearly 100 diverse human donor immune repertories, the libraries contain only the most developable frameworks and were heat-tempered to retain only the most thermostable clones. Leads from our libraries mitigate your risk from the outset, allowing you to save time and money.
  • Fit for all modality classes. We can express your scFv hits as any desired downstream format, including scFv, IgG, CAR-T, bispecific, and ADC therapeutics. Leverage Charles River’s end-to-end antibody development expertise and cutting-edge infrastructure to power your innovations from hit identification to the clinic.
  • Demonstrated success. Our antibody libraries have a >95% success rate in delivering binders, and they have been validated in peer-reviewed research. Our team has completed 130+ de novo antibody discovery programs to date, including candidates currently in clinical trials.

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ScFv Antibody Libraries

Our phage display antibody library was originally developed by antibody experts. The natural immune repertoires from nearly 100 diverse human donors were computationally analyzed and used to generate a library optimized for CDR sequence diversity. Developability was hardwired into the phage library design, by utilizing 100% human germline framework scaffolds with optimal properties for clinical development. As a result, leads generated from services display high specificity and expression, appropriate folding, and enhanced thermostability, as well as decreased immunogenicity, aggregation, and other biochemical liabilities.

The scFv antibody library with high clonal diversity, meaning no single clone occupies a disproportionate amount of space within the phage library. Analyses of dozens of campaigns against various targets have shown that unique hits have an average 9.7 amino acid distance from one another in the CDRH3 region, a true testament to the incredible diversity achievable. In as few as 8 weeks, we can deliver a panel of up to 48 unique antibody hits with diverse affinities, all royalty-free. At least four candidates discovered via discovery services are now in a clinical phase of drug development.

digital rendering of a monoclonal antibody

Zero to Antibody Hero: Laying the Groundwork for Preclinical Success
Are you doing everything you can to de-risk your antibody candidates? What does it take to go to preclinical development with a high degree of confidence? View this webinar to follow the journey of an antibody ‘candidate hero’ as it progresses through the early discovery gauntlet.
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Discovery Services and Phage Display Library

The phage display antibody service uses our newest and largest antibody phage library. It features unprecedented diversity, containing 100 billion fully human clones with virtually no clonal redundancy. We employed a dual diversity approach to capture engineered (synthetic) and natural human CDRs, to maximize diversity while reducing sequence liabilities. As with our services, antibodies delivered are fully human and highly developable, to accelerate your antibody development journey. Finally, the library also affords the utmost in clone exclusivity and IP protection, as it is not available for external licensing. We deliver up to 48 unique lead candidates with a range of affinities, all royalty-free and never licensed to anyone else.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About ScFv Phage Display Libraries

  • What is the antibody library?

    The antibody library is a synthetic antibody library, with fully human antibody CDR and framework sequences, computationally optimized for diversity and developability. Through the analysis of human antibody repertoires and known monoclonal therapeutics in human phase trials, it delivers thousands of unique hits with superior affinity, cross-species coverage, and improved drug-like characteristics in as few as eight weeks.

  • Do the antibody libraries have success with challenging target classes such as GPCRs?

    Our discovery platform has successfully generated hits against the class A GPCR CXCR5 and has optimized hits against another (undisclosed) GPCR. There is no longer a need to go to nonhuman antibodies to target GPCRs. Beyond target discovery, we can also help with pharmacology studies, regulatory safety support, and all the way through to IND studies.

  • How do the antibody libraries avoid immunogenicity liabilities?

    Immunogenicity doesn’t manifest until human trials. Liabilities can surface at this late stage and the therapeutic can be rendered inactive and even cause negative health outcomes in recipients. The antibody libraries address immunogenicity up front by using antibodies that are entirely human by design. Libraries are built using fully human CDR sequences, as well as frameworks with dominant alleles found in all human populations.