next-generation sequencing Archives

We are pleased and proud to announce the incorporation of the Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR) Community into the Society.

The AIRR Community is a research-driven group that is organizing and coordinating stakeholders in the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies to study antibody (Ab)/B-cell and T-cell receptor (TcR) repertoires. Recent advances in sequencing technology have made it possible to sample the immune repertoire in exquisite detail. AIRR sequencing has enormous promise for understanding the dynamics of the immune repertoire in vaccinology, infectious disease, autoimmunity, and cancer biology, but also poses substantial challenges. The AIRR Community was established to meet these challenges. The AIRR Community and its associated meetings and workshops are designed to develop standards and recommendations for: 1) obtaining, analyzing, curating and comparing/sharing NGS AIRR datasets; 2) using and validating tools for analyzing AIRR data; 3) relating AIRR NGS datasets to other “big data” sets, such as microarray, flow cytometric, and MiSeq gene-expression data; and 4) legal and ethical issues involving the use and sharing of AIRR data sets derived from human sources. The proceedings of the workshops, including the recommendations and action plans, will be published to benefit the larger scientific community.

To learn more about the AIRR Community and its work, please explore the items listed under the ‘AIRR Community’ tab above.

The Antibody Society invites you to attend its annual meeting, Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics, on December 11-15, 2017 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, San Diego, CA!

The session on “Novel antibody display, selection and screening technologies”, chaired by Andrew Bradbury, M.D., Ph.D. Research Scientist and Group Leader, Los Alamos National Laboratories; Chief Scientific Officer, Specifica, focusses on the new technologies expected to advance antibody library generation and selection in the future. Many of these reflect the rapidly growing role of next generation sequencing (NGS) in all aspects of in vitro antibody generation. Dr. Bradbury will discuss how NGS has enabled more informed discussions on antibody library sizes, and how traditional selection from antibody libraries does not address the full depth of possible positive antibodies. Tim Whitehead (Michigan State University) will discuss the power of NGS in protein engineering to analyze the outcomes of different selective pressures on antibody stability, affinity and function, and to use this information in antibody discovery programs, while Brandon DeKosky (The University of Kansas) will describe how the combination of cloning natural paired antibody responses to viruses with yeast display vectors provides insights into neutralizing HIV and Ebola responses. In addition to NGS, Benjamin Hackel (University of Minnesota) will describe the engineering of novel alternative novel yeast display vectors as applied to the development of novel small non-antibody scaffolds. James Wells (UCSF) will describe an innovative use of novel proteomic technologies involving phage display to both understand how cancer cells remodel their membrane proteomes, as well as to generate recombinant antibodies against them. Once potential therapeutic antibody leads have been identified, they need to be further developed before they can be used in the clinic. This involves understanding and overcoming fundamental challenges related to the design and selection of antibodies with high affinity, specificity, stability and solubility, a topic that will addressed by Peter Tessier (University of Michigan).

Interested in attending the meeting? Learn more from this PDF, which includes all session summaries written by the chairpersons.

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Membership is free for students and employees of the Society’s corporate sponsors.