Philip Leighton

Since the first monoclonal antibody therapy was approved almost forty years ago, the technologies and strategies used in the discovery and expression of immunotherapies have continued to evolve. While the first approved therapies were chimeric proteins or humanized scaffolds, today, transgenic animals dominate discovery platforms. While early therapies derived from mice, today, many different species demonstrate their unique advantages in the field. Because of its phylogenetic distance from humans, the chicken can often generate a superior immune response compared to mice when looking for antibodies to highly conserved proteins. Similarly, camelids express a single domain antibody, a so-called VHH, a heavy chain that does not require a light chain to be co-expressed. The resulting molecule is significantly smaller than an IgG and at an advantage when the targeted epitope is small or partially hidden. We have developed the OmniDAB© chicken, a chicken capable of expressing an autonomous heavy chain. These heavy chain only birds mount a robust immune response to a model antigen and display wide epitope coverage. This talk will discuss our recent work using the OmniDAB platform to generate functional, high affinity antibodies to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2.