Construction of human naive antibody gene libraries

Abstract

Human antibodies are valuable tools for proteome research and diagnostics. Furthermore, antibodies are a rapidly growing class of therapeutic agents, mainly for inflammation and cancer therapy. The first therapeutic antibodies are of murine origin and were chimerized or humanized. The later-developed antibodies are fully human antibodies. Here, two technologies are competing the hybridoma technology using transgenic mice with human antibody gene loci and antibody phage display. The starting point for the selection of human antibodies against any target is the construction of an antibody phage display gene library. In this review we describe the construction of human naive and immune antibody gene libraries for antibody phage display. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.