A novel method for construction of gene fragment library to searching epitopes

Phage Display Technology as a Powerful Platform for Antibody Drug Discovery

Antibody drugs with a high affinity and specificity are effective and safe for intractable diseases, such as cancers and autoimmune diseases. Furthermore, they have played a central role in drug discovery, currently accounting for eight of the top 20 pharmaceutical products worldwide by sales. Forty years ago, clinical trials on antibody drugs that were thought to be a magic bullet failed, partly due to the immunogenicity of monoclonal antibodies produced in mice. The recent breakthrough in antibody drugs is largely because of the contribution of phage display technology. Here, we reviewed the importance of phage display technology as a powerful platform for antibody drug discovery from various perspectives, such as the development of human monoclonal antibodies, affinity enhancement of monoclonal antibodies, and the identification of therapeutic targets for antibody drugs.

Epitope mapping using phage-display random fragment libraries

Phage-display has become a method of choice for epitope mapping and has been successfully used in numerous published studies. Although the inaugural studies were all done with random peptide libraries (see Chapter "Epitope Mapping Using Phage Display Peptide Libraries"), gene- or genome-targeted random fragment libraries have proven to be a more effective epitope mapping approach for some antibodies. In this chapter, we describe the mapping of linear and conformational epitopes of the major African swine fever virus capsid protein using monoclonal as well as polyclonal antibodies.