There are many ways of generating human antibodies for therapeutics, basically split between immunization and in vitro naïve antibody library approaches. Whichever method is used, industry has been wrestling with three critical challenges: diversity, affinity and developability.

Antibodies must have biological activity, so the greater the diversity of available antibodies, the greater the chance an antibody with appropriate biological activity can be found. Once an antibody with biological activity has been found, high affinity is usually required.

However, antibodies with excellent activity and affinity, may not be useful as therapeutics if they are not developable.

The main advantage of In vitro selection from naïve libraries is the ability to directly select for specific properties. This contrasts with immunization, where researchers screen what the immune system provides. Notwithstanding the advantages of selection over screening, immunization has been generally preferred, as antibodies from historical naïve libraries tended to have lower diversities, lower affinities and more developability problems.

With its Generation 3 Platform, Specifica has overcome the challenges of diversity, affinity and developability, making antibody libraries so effective that the advantages of in vitro selection can now be fully realized, and complex selections can be carried out.

At Specifica we live Antibody Libraries. Forever innovating, we have generated over 100 naive individual Libraries using different scaffolds, formats, variable gene sources and diversity sets. We learn from failure – a better teacher than success. We understand the complexities of Antibody Library construction. By using cutting edge next generation sequencing (NGS) for quality control at all steps of construction and validation we are able to count, rather than estimate, the number of different antibodies in each Specifica library, so ensuring our high diversity standards.

Whether a Generation 2 or a Generation 3 Library, high guaranteed diversities mean more antibodies, recognizing more epitopes, with higher affinities, against more targets. Libraries are usually provided in phage display formats, and, except for Fab, can also be supplied in the yeast display format.