Isogenica’s Blogs
Synthetic Biology Technologies for Antibody Discovery
Imagine bypassing the lengthy traditional immunization process and tapping into the antibody diversity equivalent of over a million llamas – right at your fingertips. Synthetic Biology Technologies are transforming antibody discovery, accelerating the design of targeted therapies with greater precision, speed, and reduced risk. Read now!
Nanobody or VHH – What’s the difference?
In the realm of biotechnology and medicine, the terms nanobody and VHH are often used interchangeably to describe single-domain antibodies. These small-format versions of traditional antibodies have grown as cornerstones of scientific innovation from diagnostics to cell and gene therapies. But where do these names come from, and what meanings do they have for describing what makes them so pivotal in today’s research and therapeutic applications?
Tools for ADC drug discovery – screening VHHs with pre-engineered C-terminal cysteine handles
Isogenica developed a screening approach using pre-engineered C-terminal Cysteine handles. VHHs expressed well in this format and formed spontaneous stable dimers. This approach can now be applied to future projects which require VHH antibody conjugation for ADC and other applications.
Specific Antibodies to Difficult Targets: How to find the needles in the haystack
Peptides, often small and unstructured, are some of the most difficult targets in antibody discovery. Here, we recount how we tweaked our approach to mining our vast VHH libraries to isolate highly specific binders for difficult targets like these, even when other methods had failed.
Advantages of using VHH antibodies for CAR engineering
We explain the advantages of VHHs for CAR ectodomain targeting relative to traditional scFvs including size, solubility, and VHHs unique “magic finger” CDR3 domain.
Small antibodies, big libraries
As VHH antibody experts, we’re big proponents of using synthetic libraries for antibody discovery. But what exactly are the benefits? Do they even produce good molecules? And what do you gain by having access to the largest and most diverse VHH libraries on the market?
Appetite for destruction: ‘Plug and play’ targeted protein degradation using synthetic VHH antibodies to take out tricky targets
Novel VHH protein degraders developed using Isogenica’s VHH antibody libraries show anti-tumour activity in vivo.
‘Intrabodies’ – Isogenica’s VHH antibodies improve heart function when delivered intracellularly
Our VHH antibodies have been put to the test as a potential new therapy for heart failure in an early-stage study from AstraZeneca published in Nature Communications. In a step forward for intracellular biotherapeutics, this early stage investigational research also used a viral vector to deliver our VHH antibodies directly inside heart cells.
2-for-1 VHH antibody engineering
When a partner needed VHH antibody engineering fast, we developed a method to humanise and affinity mature the antibodies in a single step.
VHH Humanisation
VHH humanisation can be a challenge. Here, we compare two methods – safe-but-slow rational humanisation and fast-but-risky CDR grafting. We also explore the impact of synthetic versus immune-derived frameworks.