Guidelines in the Preparation of Fully Synthetic, Human Single-Domain Antibody Phage Display Libraries.

Background/objectives: The complexity of diseases such as cancer and auto-immune disorders drives the need for unique, target-driven therapeutics. A broader arsenal to generate better biologics-based therapeutics is needed to provide more efficient and effective antibody generation technologies. The critical parameter for antibody generation is to generate as much candidate diversity to each target as possible.

Method/results: We present guidelines for having an efficient process using a fully synthetic human single-domain antibody (sdAb) phage display library. Critical milestones for success focused on library quality control (QC) assessments, evaluation of specific biopanning outputs, and construct designs that enabled efficient transition to mammalian expression. The synthetic VHO libraries produced epitope diversity better than an immunized sourced library with candidates possessing nM potencies and monodispersity > 90% via SEC.

Conclusions: Synthetic human scaffold sdAb phage display libraries was constructed, biopanned, and selected candidates that could be directly transitioned for mammalian expression. The diverse VHO sets of candidates produced from many targets easily provided opportunities to make a multi-specific biological compound. Both synthetic and immunized phage selection campaign results suggested that these technologies complemented each other to generate therapeutic candidates. Finally, we demonstrated how diverse data produced from a process that used VHO synthetic libraries could accelerate drug discovery.