CHO Targeted Integration Platform for Accelerated Antibody Development

Developing therapeutic antibodies remains technically challenging, extremely time-consuming, and costly. The process starts with discovering antibodies with specific binding affinity and desirable functionalities, followed by producing antibodies in mammalian cells to provide enough high-quality materials for pre-clinical and clinical studies before getting approval and reaching the market.

Antibody discovery has relied on either in vivo immunisation of animals or in vitro display-based technologies, such as phage display. Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are the dominant mammalian cells for antibody production due to their capability to perform proper assembly of complexes and human-like glycosylation. The transition from antibody development to production, which involves re-cloning of antibody genes and changes in antibody format and production of host cells, not only results in increased time and cost, but also the failure of many antibody candidates.

To improve the efficiency of antibody development and success rate, we have developed a CHO targeted integration platform which enables simultaneous display and secretion of antibodies. With the display function, this platform allows high-throughput screening of antibody libraries to identify antibodies with high binding affinity and high expression level. With the secretion function, the identified CHO cells presenting promising antibodies can produce enough material for developability assessment and functional studies. The developed platform provides a streamlined process, significantly reducing the antibody development’s risk, timeline, and cost. In this talk, we will introduce the design of this platform and its applications in antibody development, such as antibody humanisation and engineering.