Can antibodies be “vegan”? A guide through the maze of today’s antibody generation methods

ABSTRACT

There is no doubt that today’s life sciences would look very different without the availability of millions of research antibody products. Nevertheless, the use of antibody reagents that are poorly characterized has led to the publication of false or misleading results. The use of laboratory animals to produce research antibodies has also been criticized. Surprisingly, both problems can be addressed with the same technology. This review charts today’s maze of different antibody formats and the various methods for antibody production and their interconnections, ultimately concluding that sequence-defined recombinant antibodies offer a clear path to both improved quality of experimental data and reduced use of animals.

KEYWORDS:

• Monoclonal antibodies
• polyclonal antibodies
• recombinant antibodies
• multiclonal antibodies
• non-animal derived antibodies, phage display, 3R, immunoglobulin, library, somatic hypermutation

Acknowledgment

We thank Janice M. Reichert for her valuable comments to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The author is associated with companies that employ animal-free antibody generation, antibody engineering and clinical development of antibodies (mAb-factory GmbH, Yumab GmbH, Abcalis GmbH, Mabswitch Inc., Corat Therapeutics GmbH).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.