Automated pipeline for rapid production and screening of HIV-specific monoclonal antibodies using pichia pastoris

ABSTRACT Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that bind and neutralize human pathogens have great therapeutic potential. Advances in automated screening and liquid handling have resulted in the ability to discover antigen‐specific antibodies either directly from human blood or from various combinatorial libraries (phage, bacteria, or yeast). There remain, however, bottlenecks in the cloning, expression and evaluation of such lead antibodies identified in primary screens that hinder high‐throughput screening. As such, “hit‐to‐lead identification” remains both expensive and time‐consuming. By combining the advantages of overlap extension PCR (OE–PCR) and a genetically stable yet easily manipulatable microbial expression host Pichia pastoris, we have developed an automated pipeline for the rapid production and screening of full‐length antigen‐specific mAbs. Here, we demonstrate the speed, feasibility and cost‐effectiveness of our approach by generating several broadly neutralizing antibodies against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2015;112: 2624–2629. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. To address bottlenecks in full‐length monoclonal antibody (mAb) production and screening, Shah et al. developed an overlap extension PCR (OE‐PCR) based method for assembling mAb expression constructs from heavy and light chain variable regions derived from single human B cells. The assembled constructs were used in an automated pipeline for production and evaluation of expressed mAbs from Pichia pastoris for antigen specificity.