Invited Speaker

Systematic Generation of Renewable Antibodies for Epigenetic Proteins to Enable Target Validation
Johan Weigelt
Sweden

The SGC is a public-private partnership that was formed to enable drug discovery by placing 3D structures of medically important proteins from human and human parasites into the public domain, without restriction on use. Over the past 3 years, SGC scientists have been responsible for >25% and >80% respectively of the new human and Apicomplexa protein structures done worldwide, and 15% of the structural information available for human proteins in the Protein Data Bank. The structures (totalling over 900) all derive from the SGC Target List, which is a list of “prioritized” proteins prepared by the SGC funders.

In order to maximize the value to the community the SGC is engaging in additional projects that build on SGC accomplishments. Typically these projects seek to create reagents to enable target discovery and validation. One such project comprises generation of validated renewable antibodies to more than 300 proteins implicated in epigenetic signaling. This project rests on the ability of the SGC to produce large quantities of proteins to be used as antigens for antibody production, and is complimentary to a similar project seeking to develop chemical tool compounds for the same set of protein targets. The SGC is working with a group of collaborators that use different technologies for antibody generation. The in vitro Antibody Consortium (IVAC) working with phage-display technologies comprises Stefan Dübel (Technische Universität Braunschweig, scFvs), John McCafferty (University of Cambridge, scFvs), Sachdev Sidhu (University of Toronto, Fabs), Anthony Kossiakoff (University of Chicago, Fabs) and Shohei Koide (University of Chicago, SABs). Alan Sawyer (EMBL Rome, Mabs) works with traditional hybridoma technology. The well-characterized reagents will be put into the public domain, with no restriction on use, to maximally benefit biomedical research.

The project is sponsored by Sidra Medical & Research Center in Doha Qatar, and over the coming three to five years an end-to-end pipeline for generation of recombinant antibodies will be established at Sidra.

The Structural Genomics Consortium is a registered charity (number 1097737) that receives funds from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, Genome Canada through the Ontario Genomics Institute, GlaxoSmithKline, Karolinska Institutet, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Ontario Innovation Trust, the Ontario Ministry for Research and Innovation, Merck & Co., Inc., the Novartis Research Foundation, the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and the Wellcome Trust