iBB

Antibody fragments (Fabs) are one of the most applied alternatives to monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), with already four Fab-based therapeutics in the market. Despite their similarity with mAbs, there is no scalable, robust and cost-efficient purification platform yet available. In this work, phage display was applied to find affinity peptides ligands as an effective purification strategy for Fabs. Two different phage biopanning schemes were designed and three peptide affinity ligands with the ability of binding Fab fragments were developed. With the methodology herein described, it is possible to find ligands within short periods of time, being the efficacy of this peptide affinity solution demonstrated in a real column purification scenario. The work  was published in Biotechnology Progress is part of the PhD thesis of André Nascimento and stems from a collaboration between BERG-IBB and Professors Steve Cramer and Pankaj Karande from RPI.