Advantages of recombinant antibodies include the fast production and high quality. Due to the in vitro method, the production is easily scalable and takes place without animals. A disadvantage are the higher costs.
This article highlights advantages and the best applications for recombinant antibodies. You will see plenty of strong reasons to choose recombinant antibodies over competing products. And we will pull occupations and persons that benefit from recombinant antibodies into the spotlight.
However, there are also areas where traditional antibodies produced with hybridoma technology are an equally good choice. Possible disadvantages of recombinant antibodies are therefore also addressed.
Next, we will present you with a distillation of a recent Nature Methods article that reports staggering and alarming findings in the literature related to traditional antibodies. To conclude, we will show what recombinant antibody expression can do to alleviate those issues.
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Antibodies generated by means of recombinant antibody technology offer several key benefits over traditional methods:
Recombinant antibodies seem to compensate many limitations of monoclonal antibodies. They are better in reproducibility, the process is scalable and flexible. However, the price of recombinant antibodies is high compared to monoclonal antibodies.
High quality goes hand in hand with skilled labor and the development and manufacturing costs. All in all, this results in higher costs. Depending on how high the quality requirements for an antibody project are, cheaper produced antibodies or recombinant produced antibodies can be used. In some cases, this carries the risk of quality variations from batch to batch and several months of waiting until the order is fulfilled. When short lead times, large quantities and high quality antibodies are required, a recombinant antibody service provider is the only choice.
With the increasing availability of high quality antibodies, the range of important applications has broadened considerably in recent years. Various life-science and medicine related fields have a strong need for high quality recombinant antibodies. Examples are:
In short, the answer lies in recombinant antibodies advantages. Scientific progress has been exponentially increasing in recent years. Its need for increasingly specific tools and reagents is catered by the advent of recombinant technology.
Molecular biology techniques and its applications to antibody expression in vitro brought numerous benefits to biotechnology, life-sciences and medicine.
A recent article in Nature Methods features the increasing popularity of recombinant antibodies.1
The author highlights the fact that numerous older life-science publications, using catalogue antibodies derived from animals, suffer from reproducibility issues.
As a staggering example, the article notes a series of 15 publications with almost 70,000 primary and secondary citations that focus on a protein that is believed to be involved in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia.
Unbelievably, many researchers used antibodies that were found to not show relevant affinity or specificity to the protein in question. This example reveals the dire need for easily available high quality recombinant antibodies in the research community.
Subsequently, the author cites a report of the European Commission on the topic of antibodies. Antibodies can and should be produced without the use of animals, advises the EC report, and establishes that the obtained products are at least as well-performing as traditional antibodies.
When reviewing recombinant antibodies for a specific field of use, there is a variety of factors to be taken into consideration. What are the specific requirements? What do the antibodies be equipped with, and what is the best way to produce them?
As there is no one-size-fits-all solution, a thorough evaluation has to take place in order to make an optimal choice.
Since its foundation in 2010, evitria has become a leading service provider for recombinant antibody expression services.
In addition, evitria has become efficient enough to be able to offer a record-setting five week time-scale and oftentimes finishes even faster.
Moreover, evitria enables its customers to access afucosylated antibodies through its exclusive licensing partnership to use ProBioGen’s GlymaxX (R) technology.
When asked about their impression of evitria, its customers reported back that they value evitria for its speed of processing, quality and purity of products, efficiency and pleasantness of cooperation.
1. Marx V. Change-makers bring on recombinant antibodies. Nature Methods. Published August 2020. Accessed May 27, 2021. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-020-0915-8.pdf