In Vivo and In Vitro Strategies for Generating Diverse Human Antibody Repertoires

Now that biologics, and in particular antibodies, are supporting the growth of pharmaceutical product pipelines, there continues to be great interest in optimizing antibody discovery platforms to efficiently generate high quality therapeutic leads. For over 20 years, novel human sequence antibodies have been available through the use of either engineered animals or in vitro display technologies. Both of these approaches have evolved and improved over time, and presently there are numerous examples of working platforms. However, at this time it is still not feasible to physically generate repertoires that include the entire theoretical sequence diversity possible for an antibody molecule, let alone screen such a repertoire for desired variants, so all platforms have an inherent limit on repertoire diversity at the sequence level. This constraint challenges us to design repertoires that possess the functional diversity to specifically recognize a wide array of potential drug targets while yielding developable leads within a manageable and resource-conservative process.

This Research Topic seeks to foster thought and discussion on strategies to create and utilize next generation platforms, as well as the latest in-depth methods to understand and characterize the resulting repertoires. We encourage submissions that focus on library design and repertoire generation strategies, regardless of the type of expression/selection system used.