Upcoming immunization dates (please provide your antigen at least one week in advance):
A unique type of antibodies
Nanobodies™ are a unique form of monoclonal antibodies, characterized by a single antigen binding domain, present in camels. The Department of Cellular and Molecular Interactions discovered the unique properties of camelid antibodies several years ago and subsequently optimized the nanobody™ technology and its applications.
Recombinant Nanobodies™ are small (15kDa) and strictly monomeric. They bind the target with nM affinity, are stable and easy to manipulate. Moreover, the Nanobodies™ often bind to epitopes that are less immunogenic for conventional antibodies, such as the active sites of enzymes. Due to their small size, they also target areas that are not accessible to standard antibodies. Another advantage is that they are well expressed in bacterial expression systems so that they are cheaper and easier to produce (at mg/liter culture) in all kind of formats than standard monoclonal antibodies.
A wide range of applications
Nanobodies™ have a wide range of applications and can be used in immunohistochemistry, immunomodulation, intracellular expression (intrabodies), biosensor-applications, etc.
This unique Nanobody™ technology expertise, available within VIB, is available to VIB and non-VIB academic research groups through the Nanobody Service Facility. For commercial use and for companies wishing to collaborate with VIB, the Nanobody™ technology is only available within VIB outside the field of diagnostics and therapeutics, please contact Barbara Leyman licensing manager from VIB.
To obtain Nanobodies™, the researcher provides the Nanobody Service Facility with a sufficiently pure protein or peptide (~0.5 mg).
• The facility delivers 1 to 10 different Nanobodies™ for a given antigen.
• Nanobodies™ that score positive in ELISA will be supplied as bacterial clones.
• The researcher also obtains the antigen binding sequence of each Nanobody™.
• The affinity of the Nanobody™ will be in the range of 0.1 to 100 nM for proteinaceous antigens or from 0.1 to 10 µM for peptidic/haptenic antigens.
• Timeline: about 3 months from immunization until delivery of Nanobodies™.
• The success-rate for the entire procedure is about 70-80 %. The scientist will only be charged after the successful delivery of a Nanobody™.
In addition to the delivery of standard Nanobodies™, additional services can be offered:
• Determination and ranking of affinity (kon, koff, KD).
• Engineering towards higher stability, affinity.
• Expression vectors are available to express modified recombinant constructs:
o Nanobodies™ can be cloned in front of a human or mouse IgG domain (or any other animal/isotype).
o Nanobodies™ can be tagged with Flag, c-myc, His, Cy-dyes, FITC, GFP, lactamase etc.
o Nanobodies™ can be biotinylated for use in immunoprecipitation applications with streptavidin beads.
o Nanobodies™ can be engineered into bivalent or bispecific antibody constructs.
Interested?
Contact Gholamreza Hassanzadeh Ghassabeh at the Nanobody Service Facility
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