About Deep Sequencing and Single Cell Analysis for Antibody Discovery 2019

DEEP SEQUENCING AND SINGLE CELL ANALYSIS FOR ANTIBODY DISCOVERY, SAN DIEGO, JANUARY 17-18, 2019

The rapid adoption of deep sequencing and single B cell analysis has given discovery scientists an extraordinary view into human and animal immune repertoires that is now informing all aspects of biopharmaceutical R&D. This dynamic field is bringing together the disciplines of immunology, structural and computational biology, informatics and microfluidics to offer previously unimaginable perspectives that will drive discovery of the next generation of biologic drugs. PepTalk’s Inaugural Deep Sequencing and Single Cell Analysis for Antibody Discovery explores the vast range of new science and technology in this field and how these new capabilities are being integrated with traditional discovery methods.

Hybridoma and B cell cloning remain the main technologies for antibody discovery in the industry. Although significantly improved over the years, these technologies still have a relatively limited repertoire sampling capacity which often results in relatively limited panel sizes and antibody leads that require further optimization. Deep sequencing technologies have been integrated in the antibody discovery workflow to enhance the sampling of immune repertoires for rapid discovery of optimized antibody leads.

In principle, humans can make an antibody response to any non-self-antigen molecule. We have examined the circulating B cell populations of ten healthy human subjects and present the largest single collection of human adaptive immune receptor sequences described to date, comprising almost 3 billion nearly full-length antibody heavy chain sequences. This repertoire-scale dataset reveals a surprising degree of repertoire uniqueness, a subpopulation of public antibody clonotypes and exceptional repertoire diversity.