Recent advancements in molecular biology greatly facilitated the production of antibody fragments, in particular single-domain antibody (sdAb) and their application as a probe in molecular imaging and immunodetection systems. Armed with advanced phage display technology, Creative Biolabs provides an integrated solution for custom recombinant sdAb selection and validation. With the increasing demand for molecular diagnostics and in vivo imaging, Creative Biolabs fully integrates existing resources and leverages our technical experience in antibody preparation and disease diagnosis to provide our customers with sdAb-based diagnostic tools development services for academic use.
SdAbs are recombinant, single-domain, variable fragments of camelid heavy chain-only antibodies with an approximate molecular weight of 12-15 kDa. SdAbs are highly adaptable tools for disease research as they enable specific modulation of targets, enzymatic and non-enzymatic proteins alike. For instance, in tumor research, molecular imaging studies benefit from the rapid, homogeneous tumor accumulation of sdAbs and their fast blood clearance, permitting previously unattainable fast tumor visualization.
Fig.1 A schematic representation of sdAb and antibody domains. (Chakravarty, 2014)
Detection probes should ideally meet most of the following characteristics: high probe accessibility, stability and selectivity towards the antigen, and large-scale production in a cost-effective manner. The superior characteristics of sdAb made it possible to obtain a higher probe density and the facile engineering of the sdAb allowed a directional immobilization, so that a higher ligand binding capacity is obtained without binding interference from contaminants in the sample. For affinity chromatography, coupling green fluorescent protein (GFP)-binding sdAbs onto a monovalent matrix allows fast, efficient, one-step isolation of GFP-fusion proteins and their interacting partners. Besides, sdAbs can be generated to uncover novel, species-specific epitopes and that such sdAbs are well suited to develop species-specific antigen detection assays.
Molecular imaging is the foundation for an accurate diagnosis. Recently, sdAbs have attracted much attention as they fulfill most of the requisites of an ideal probe for successful molecular imaging. Among different imaging techniques, single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), positron emission tomography (PET), ultrasonography (US), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and optical imaging have been successfully employed for molecular imaging using sdAbs. As an intriguing platform, sdAbs have been proposed as potential molecular imaging tools not only in oncology but also for monitoring and quantifying arthritis, atherosclerosis and other inflammatory diseases. In previous studies, sdAbs based imaging tools against EGFR, HER-2, HGF, MMR, VCAM-1, CEA have been developed for pre-clinical and/or clinical molecular imaging.
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