In the race to develop new biologics, therapeutic antibodies stand out as one of the most successful and rapidly expanding classes of drugs. By 2025, over 200 antibody therapeutics have reached the market, with nearly 1,400 more in clinical evaluation. This boom is driven by antibodies’ high specificity and versatile applications – from oncology and immunology to infectious diseases. However, discovering and producing a promising antibody candidate is a complex, multi-step process. Traditional workflows, such as hybridoma generation or phage display library panning, often require many months to yield viable leads and may not capture the full diversity or optimal affinities needed. For biopharma companies large and small, scaling these efforts – in speed, throughput, and production capacity – has become a critical challenge in order to meet pressing R&D timelines and medical needs.
Biointron, founded in 2012, has emerged as a specialized CRO addressing these challenges head-on. With ISO 9001:2015 certification and a focus on antibody discovery, expression, and optimization, Biointron offers an integrated suite of services that drastically compress development timelines while maintaining high quality. From fully human monoclonal discovery to gram-scale manufacturing, Biointron’s platforms are designed to support projects at any stage – whether it’s hit finding, lead optimization, or production of material for preclinical studies.
The Need for Scalable Antibody Discovery in Biopharma R&D
Developing a therapeutic antibody is not as simple as finding a bind-and-go molecule. Modern antibody discovery faces several key challenges:
Speed to Candidate: In competitive disease areas (e.g., oncology, infectious disease), being first or best-in-class often hinges on rapid identification of antibody hits. Traditional methods like hybridoma technology can take several months to generate monoclonal antibodies and even longer to optimize them. Phage display libraries, while powerful, involve laborious panning cycles and often yield artificial antibody fragments that require reformatting and affinity maturation. These prolonged timelines can slow down a biopharma’s ability to advance a drug candidate. The industry has recognized that accelerating early discovery – going “from days to hits” – can significantly shorten the overall drug development cycle.
Diversity and Specificity: The human immune system is capable of producing a vast repertoire of antibodies, with millions of B cells each secreting a unique antibody. Capturing this diversity in discovery is crucial for finding high-affinity, specific binders, especially against tough targets (e.g., when seeking rare epitopes or avoiding cross-reactivity). Conventional in vitro libraries may not fully represent the nuanced diversity and natural pairing of heavy and light chains found in vivo. This can lead to suboptimal candidates that need further engineering. There is a growing need for discovery platforms that tap directly into in vivo-matured antibody repertoires for broader and more relevant candidate pools.
Humanization and Immunogenicity: Many therapeutic antibodies historically originated from mouse hybridomas, which then had to be humanized (modified to reduce immune rejection in patients). This adds extra steps and time, and not every antibody is easily humanizable without losing affinity. Newer approaches using transgenic mice that produce fully human antibodies, or in vitro selections using human antibody libraries, aim to sidestep this issue. A fully human antibody from the get-go greatly simplifies downstream development and reduces the risk of immunogenic reactions in patients.
Throughput and Parallelism: The “shots on goal” philosophy in antibody discovery means testing many candidates to find the eventual winner. It’s common to want to express and screen dozens or even hundreds of antibody variants (different clones, isotypes, or formats) in parallel – for example, variants of a lead optimized for affinity or biophysical properties. Doing this at scale in a traditional lab is non-trivial, as expression and purification of each antibody can take weeks. High-throughput expression systems and automation are needed to increase capacity (for instance, producing hundreds of antibodies at a time) so that researchers can cast a wide net and iterate quickly.
Manufacturability and Scaling: Identifying a good antibody is only half the battle; producing enough of it for animal studies, clinical trials, and eventual commercialization is the other half. Some antibodies that work well in small-scale may be challenging to produce at larger scale due to stability or expression issues. Biopharma companies must assess early if a candidate can be manufactured economically and consistently. This necessitates expertise in cell line development, bioreactor scale-up, and process optimization. Having the ability to seamlessly scale from milligram-level research batches to multi-gram or even kilogram yields is a major advantage to streamline the path from bench to clinic.
Given these challenges, it’s clear why many biopharma firms seek specialized partners and platforms. Biointron’s service portfolio has been explicitly crafted to address these issues. The following sections will detail how each of Biointron’s core offerings – from the AbDrop™ discovery platform to large-scale CHO production – contributes to solving common bottlenecks and propelling antibody projects forward faster.
Biointron’s End-to-End Antibody Discovery and Production
One of Biointron’s distinguishing features is its end-to-end capability. Rather than offering a single piece of the puzzle, Biointron provides a continuum of services that can take a project from an initial antigen or hybridoma sequence all the way to a ready-to-use antibody product. This integration ensures that knowledge is shared across stages (discovery, engineering, production), reducing hand-off delays and technical risks. It also means clients can use Biointron as a one-stop shop, simplifying project management.
High-Throughput Antibody Discovery with AbDrop™ – Single B Cell Screening
One of Biointron’s featured technologies is the AbDrop™ platform, a high-throughput single B cell screening system that radically accelerates the discovery of monoclonal antibodies. AbDrop™ leverages advanced microfluidics and droplet-based screening to directly interrogate B cells isolated from immunized animals (or even humans/donors in some cases) without the need for traditional hybridoma fusions or extensive library construction. The platform’s name, “AbDrop,” hints at how it works: antibodies from individual B cells are detected in tiny droplets.
How AbDrop™ Works: Biointron’s AbDrop™ uses a microfluidic chip to encapsulate millions of plasma B cells, each in its own nanoliter-scale droplet along with assay reagents. Within each droplet, the B cell’s secreted antibody can bind to a fluorescently labeled target antigen, and a fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) or similar readout identifies which droplets contain antigen-specific antibodies. Essentially, each droplet is a miniature antibody screening assay. By running this process, AbDrop™ can screen 1–2 million B cells in a single day, far outpacing traditional hybridoma methods that might screen only thousands of B-cell clones in weeks. The droplets that test positive (i.e., contain an antibody that bound the target) are rapidly sorted by the microfluidic system.
Once positive droplets are isolated, the encapsulated cells are recovered and undergo Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) to retrieve the antibody gene sequences. Notably, because each B cell is assayed individually and then sequenced, the native heavy and light chain pairing is preserved. This is a critical advantage – each antibody’s natural pairing (which Mother Nature has already optimized in that B cell) is maintained, eliminating the need to randomly pair heavy/light chains as in some display library methods. Within about a week of the droplet screening, Biointron can have hundreds (even thousands) of antibody sequences identified and analyzed via NGS.
The final step in AbDrop’s workflow is high-throughput recombinant expression and characterization of the hit antibodies. Using rapid transient expression systems (typically in mammalian cells like HEK293), Biointron produces small-scale quantities of each candidate antibody and tests their binding and functionality. Thanks to an efficient in-house gene synthesis and expression pipeline, this can be accomplished in another one to two weeks. In total, from the initial B cell sample to purified antibody candidates with validated activity can take as little as one month using AbDrop™. This is a dramatic improvement over older methods; candidate identification is achieved within days, instead of the months required by hybridoma or phage display techniques. Moreover, because AbDrop™ starts with B cells from an immunized host, the antibodies have already undergone in vivo affinity maturation. The hits are often high-affinity and specific, reducing the need for extensive downstream optimization.
Enhanced Diversity and Fully Human Antibodies: An especially powerful application of AbDrop™ is in combination with human antibody transgenic mice. Biointron has partnered with Cyagen to utilize the HUGO-Ab™ mice, which are genetically engineered to carry fully human immunoglobulin genes. When these mice are immunized with a target antigen, their B cells produce fully human antibodies (thanks to the replaced human V(D)J segments). Using AbDrop™ to screen B cells from HUGO-Ab™ mice means one can directly discover fully human monoclonal antibodies in a fraction of the time. This eliminates the need for antibody humanization entirely, because the antibodies are human from the start. It’s a safer and more efficient approach: Biointron’s high-throughput fully human antibody discovery platform, combining AbDrop™ with HUGO-Ab™, can deliver lead candidates in as fast as 3 months. The use of HUGO-Ab™ mice (based on TurboKnockout® ES gene targeting technology) ensures robust immune responses akin to normal mice, yielding a diverse range of high-affinity antibodies with low immunogenicity. In summary, this platform marries the best of both worlds – the vast diversity of an in vivo immune response and the quick, high-throughput selection of microfluidic single-cell screening.
Why It Matters: For biopharma companies, AbDrop™ offers a way to compress discovery timelines and increase the probability of finding strong antibody candidates. Faster discovery means projects move to the next stage sooner, saving valuable time in preclinical development. Additionally, because AbDrop™ can sample millions of B cells, it often uncovers rare antibodies that might be missed by smaller-scale screens. These could include antibodies against conserved but less immunodominant epitopes (important for infectious disease targets), or ones with unique mechanisms of action. The efficiency also enables tackling multiple targets or multiple immunization strategies in parallel. Companies aiming to build large antibody libraries or panels (for example, covering an entire disease pathway with different antibody drugs) particularly benefit from such scale. Traditional workflows that required sequential immunization, hybridoma fusions, subcloning, and screening would be far too slow and manpower-intensive to generate dozens of leads; AbDrop™ makes parallel discovery feasible. Moreover, since the platform yields fully human sequences when using the HUGO-Ab™ system, it aligns well with the industry’s trend toward fully human therapeutics (minimizing risk of anti-drug antibodies in the clinic). Real-world impact has been evident. Biointron reports that using AbDrop™, they were able to reduce one client’s discovery phase from about 6–9 months down to just 1–2 months for initial hits, allowing that client to leapfrog their development timeline. As one Biointron blog article put it, “AbDrop™ offers a rapid, targeted solution that reduces the discovery process from months to mere days”. This kind of speed and efficiency is a game-changer in the competitive biotech arena.
Related: High-throughput Fully Human Antibody Discovery Platform
