Animal-free antibodies Braunschweig biotechnologists win international ‘Replication Prize’
Professor Stefan Dübel and Professor Michael Hust, researchers at Technische Universität Braunschweig, have been awarded the ‘Replication Prize’ by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), in collaboration with other partners. The team was recognised for its work, which improves the reproducibility of antibody experiments and avoids the use of animal experiments.
Antibodies play a key role in biomedical research and are widely used in medical diagnostics. However, the results of experiments using antibodies derived from animal blood are only reproducible to a limited extent, as only a limited amount of blood can be collected from each animal. Different animals always produce individually varying mixtures of antibodies, meaning that long-term reproducibility of the results cannot be guaranteed. In addition, animal sera always contain many ‘undesirable’ antibodies that can distort the results.
Antibodies produced entirely without animal testing
Using antibodies produced entirely in vitro via genetic engineering and thus completely free from animal experiments (“recombinant antibodies”), the award winners were able to demonstrate through numerous examples – ranging from research to drug development – that recombinant antibodies are superior to animal blood products in terms of the reproducibility of results. The reasons for this are, firstly, that the recombinant reagent contains no ‘undesirable’ antibodies, as is the case with animal blood. Secondly, unlike animal-derived products, the blueprint of the antibody reagent is known. Using this formula, the exact same antibody can be produced in the future and in any quantity, thereby guaranteeing the reproducibility of the results.
The award-winning team led by Professor Stefan Dübel and Professor Michael Hust comprises partners from research, industry and animal welfare: Dr Esther Wenzel and Dr Kilian Zilkens from the Braunschweig-based biotechnology company ABCALIS, as well as an international team of twelve other scientists from the French 3R Centre, the French INSERM, the animal welfare organisation PETA, TU Berlin, the University of Geneva, Utrecht University and the companies Abcam, ABCD Antibodies and Unilever.
Efficient and cost-effective method
The contributions from Braunschweig to antibody research cover a broad spectrum of applications. Over the course of decades, Professor Stefan Dübel and Professor Michael Hust at TU Braunschweig have developed and optimized a method now used worldwide to produce human antibodies with countless different specificities – i.e. for a vast array of applications – in a test tube without any animal experiments. The TU team has also succeeded in making the method so efficient and cost-effective that the antibodies, with their superior properties, can now be used worldwide as research reagents. To this end, Abcalis GmbH was spun off from TU Braunschweig; the company is also part of the winning team and has been producing and distributing “vegan” antibodies for researchers around the world since 2020.
In addition to the development of fully sequence-defined human recombinant antibodies, the winner team’s award-winning work also encompasses promoting the move away from animal-derived reagents, maintaining bioinformatic databases for defined antibody sequences and validation data, and integrating recombinant antibodies as teaching content into university curricula.
“This high-profile recognition by the US National Institutes of Health of the superior quality of antibodies produced without animal testing is a powerful endorsement of our long-standing research goals. Hopefully, this will also help to raise awareness of our ‘vegan’ antibodies and their advantages among users of antibody tests,” says Professor Dübel, who heads the Department of Biotechnology at TU Braunschweig and co-invented the underlying method of antibody phage display.
Professor Michael Hust, Head of the Department of Medical Biotechnology at TU Braunschweig, who also led the team that developed an antibody against the coronavirus for clinical use in record time, adds: “We thank our team members for many years of fruitful collaboration and look forward to developing further high-quality recombinant antibodies for diagnostics and therapy in ongoing and future projects.”
Background:
Biomedical research constantly yields new scientific findings that expand our understanding of human health and open up new treatment options for diseases. The independent reproducibility of each experiment (‘replication’) is the foundation for trustworthy results and progress. In some areas of research, however, the reproducibility of results is not yet optimal. The US National Institutes of Health’s “NIH Common Fund” has therefore joined forces with NASA’s Tournament Lab to launch the “Replication Prize”. The competition seeks ideas and strategies to improve the reproducibility of key areas of biomedical research.