Transmembrane Proteins Antibody Production

As an important part of cell membrane, transmembrane proteins play an important role in many cellular functions such as material transport, signal transduction and intercellular recognition. Abnormalities in their function often lead to the development of disease, which makes them ideal targets for drug action.

Most of the druggable targets for antibody-based therapy are membrane proteins, which are notoriously hard to express. Creative Diagnostics can provide you with a variety of solutions to assist in the development of transmembrane protein antibodies.

Fig. 1 The topology of G protein coupled receptors.
(Tikhonova IG, Costanzi S. Curr Pharm Des. 2009)

Antigen preparation strategy

One of the key requirements for antibody development is to utilize the protein immunogens that best mimic the native state of the target protein. Creative Diagnostics uses the human cell line, HEK293, secretory expression system to produce the human protein, giving it a good chance of maintaining its native formation and modification.

• For Single Transmembrane Protein

We constructed many expression plasmids for different Extra Cellular Domain (ECD)-Fc fusion proteins and used HEK293 mammalian expression system for production.

• For multi-pass transmembrane protein

Creative Diagnostics has multiple platforms for you to choose from:

• Membrane Nanoparticles (MNPs)
• Exosome (EXO)
• Virus-like Particles (VLPs)
• Synthetic Nanodisc

DNA Immunization Strategy

Fig. 2 Schematic diagram of DNA Immunization.
(J.K.Lam, et.al, Pharmaceutics 2014)

Genetic immunization involves introducing the gene in the form of a cDNA directly into an animal which translates this cDNA into protein thus stimulating an immune response against the foreign protein. This immunization strategy maximizes the likelihood of producing high specificity/high affinity antibodies against structurally-intact native protein antigens.