Cheaper, Potentially Better Disease Treatments Expected From Faster Approach to Developing Therapeutic Antibodies

A method of mass-producing disease-fighting antibodies entirely within bacteria has been developed by a research group at The University of Texas at Austin. The group led by Dr. George Georgiou developed the new antibody-production approach to improve upon processes used previously to identify new drugs for arthritis, cancer and other diseases. The new approach developed in collaboration with Dr. Brent Iverson in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is faster and has other advantages.

Three men in lab
Photo by Erin McCarley, 4/2007
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Photo at left: Dr. George Georgiou (right), professor of chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, and molecular genetics and microbiology, was lead investigator of the research published recently online in Nature Biotechnology. Thomas Van Blarcom (left) and Yariv Mazor (center), are the chemical engineering students who performed the experiments described in the article.

Two men in lab coats w/bottles behind
Photo by Erin McCarley, 4/2007
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Photos at left: Postdoctoral student Yariv Mazor (on the right), lead author of the journal article, engineered antibodies to an anthrax toxin called PA. Graduate student Thomas Van Blarcom (on the left), then used a method called APEx, co-developed by Georgiou and Iverson’s lab, to identify the bacteria-bound antibodies that attached best to the PA. Van Blarcom then grew large numbers of those bacteria to begin refining the steps needed for mass-scale production of promising therapeutic antibodies

Thomas Van Barclom (on the left) and Yariv Mazor (center)
Photo by Erin McCarley, 4/2007
Click on photo for hi-res version.