Recombinant Antibodies for Immunotherapy

Melvyn Little's research group at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg was one of the first to develop methods for making and screening antibody libraries. After co-founding Affitech (Oslo, Norway) in 1997, he left the DKFZ in 2000 to found Affimed Therapeutics, a biotechnology company in Heidelberg specializing in the isolation and engineering of human antibodies to treat various diseases, especially cancer. He has been an extracurricular Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Heidelberg since 1986.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Past, present and future of recombinant antibodies G. Winter; Part II. Generation and Screening of Antibody Libraries: 2. Antibody libraries from naïve V gene sources G. Beste and D. Lowe; 3. Antibodies from IgM libraries V. Molkenthin and S. Knackmuss; Part III. Transgenic Human Antibody Repertoires: 4. The generation and screening of synthetic antibody libraries I. Klagge; 5. Therapeutic antibodies from xenoMouse transgenic mice A. Jakobovits; 6. Transgenic chimeric antibodies A. Murphy; Part IV. Humanised Antibodies: 7. Humanization of recombinant antibodies J. Saldanha; 8. Immunogenicity assessment of antibody therapeutics P. Stas, J. Pletinckx, Y. Gansemans, and I. Lasters; 9. In vitro screening for antibody immunogenicity F. Carr and M. Baker; Part V. Antibody Effector Function: 10. Mechanisms of tumour cell killing by therapeutic antibodies R. Stewart and C. Webster; 11. Optimization of Fc domains to enhance antibody therapeutics G. Lazar and A. Chamberlain; 12. Glycoengineered therapeutic antibodies P. Brünker, P. Sondermann, and P. Umana; Part VI. Arming Antibodies: 13. Monoclonal antibodies for the delivery of cytotoxic drugs D. King; 14. Immunotherapy with radioimmune conjugates C. Kousparou and A. Epenetos; 15. Immunotherapeutic antibody fusion proteins N. Courtenay-Luck and D. Jones; Part VII. Antibody Fragments: 16. Alternative antibody formats F. Le Gall and M. Little; 17. Single domain antibodies S. Muyldermans; 18. Engineering of non-CDR loops in immunoglobulin domains F. Rüker and G. Wozniak-Knopp; Part VIII. Antigen Binding Repertoires of Non-Immunoglobulin Proteins: 19. Alternative antibody scaffolds A. Plueckthun; Part IX. Prolongation of Serum Half Life: 20. Polymer fusions to increase antibody half lives: PEGylation and other modifications S. Heywood and D. Humphreys; 21. Extending antibody half-lives with albumin J. Andersen and I. Sandlie; Part X. Current Therapeutic Antibodies and Novel Developments: 22. A stem cell-based platform for the discovery and development of anti-tumor therapeutic antibodies to novel targets J. Mather, C. Fieger, T. Liang, K. King, J. Li, P. Young, C. Beltejar, B. Potts, M. Licea, and D. Loo; 23. Antibody directed enzyme prodrug therapy (ADEPT) H. Lowe, S. Sharma, and K. Bagshawe; 24. Immune privilege and tolerance - therapeutic antibody approaches D. Forman, P. Ponath, D. Mehta, J. Ponte, J. Snyder, P. Rao, H. Waldmann, and M. Rosenzweig; Part XI. Market Overview and Outlook: 25. Antibody therapeutics: business achievements and business outlook C. Bourrilly.