From Days to Hits: How AbDrop™ Accelerates Antibody Candidate Identification

In the competitive landscape of antibody development, speed and precision are necessary. Traditional antibody discovery platforms—such as hybridoma and phage display—often have lengthy timelines to generate viable antibody candidates. However, Biointron’s AbDrop™ platform, a high-throughput single B cell screening system, offers a rapid, targeted solution that reduces the discovery process from months to mere days. Here’s how AbDrop™ is transforming antibody discovery. 

Single B Cell Screening: A Faster Path to Candidate Discovery

The AbDrop™ platform uses microfluidic, droplet-based technology to isolate and screen millions of primary plasma B cells at high speed. Unlike traditional methods that depend on artificially constructed libraries or time-intensive cell line generation, AbDrop™ directly screens the natural antibody repertoire of B cells. This approach allows for the immediate capture of fully mature antibody sequences, vastly accelerating the screening process. 

The result? AbDrop™ achieves candidate identification within days, as opposed to the weeks or months required by traditional methods. 

Related: How High-Affinity Antibodies Improve Therapeutic Outcomes

Maximizing Diversity and Specificity

AbDrop™ addresses one of the most challenging aspects of antibody discovery: generating a diverse pool of highly specific antibodies. By directly accessing and screening the complete plasma cell repertoire, AbDrop™ identifies antibodies that reflect the native diversity of the immune system. 

Each screened B cell retains its naturally paired heavy and light chains, capturing the authentic antibody structure. This direct approach minimizes the need for subsequent optimization, as the isolated antibodies are already tailored to bind their targets with high affinity and specificity. In contrast, phage display and hybridoma approaches often yield candidates requiring additional rounds of affinity maturation or humanization, which can delay project timelines. 

Streamlined Workflow and Efficiency Gains

One of the platform’s standout features is its streamlined workflow, reducing the steps needed to generate viable candidates. The typical AbDrop™ process involves several tightly integrated stages: 

• Target Plasma Cell Sorting: Millions of plasma B cells are sorted and individually encapsulated in microfluidic droplets. This encapsulation enables precise control over each screening event, maximizing throughput. 

• Single-Cell NGS Sequencing: Within a week, AbDrop™ performs next-generation sequencing on each B cell, allowing for the rapid characterization of the full antibody sequence repertoire. 

• High-Precision Antibody Expression and Characterization: Using recombinant systems like HEK293 cells, antibodies are expressed and characterized, ensuring candidates meet specific binding and functional criteria. 

With this workflow, AbDrop™ can deliver hundreds of unique, naturally paired heavy and light chains, cutting down the total discovery process to approximately one month from screening to candidate selection.  

Our High-throughput Fully Human Antibody Discovery Platform integrates Cyagen’s HUGO-Ab™ mice with Biointron’s AbDrop™ microdroplet-based single B cell screening. This powerful combination accelerates the discovery and development of fully human antibodies, reducing the time from target identification to therapeutic candidate to just three months. Learn more about the service here.