One of our group members, Niamh Haslett, has recently seen her PhD have an impact outside of our usual research activities, through her time working with an Animal Free Research UK (AFRUK) initiative to create a database of recombinant antibodies:
https://antibodies.humanspecificresearch.org/
Why we think this is interesting:
Antibodies are proteins which living things produce to bind to foreign entities in the body. This is useful because the binding is really specific, so they give really unparalleled performance in sticking to their targets. This means that if we want to do things like say whether a particular molecule is in a sample, then we can get the antibody that binds to that molecule, add it to the sample and see whether the antibody sticks to anything. This is the broad premise of a lot of “immunoassays” like pregnancy tests, which use antibodies that bind something called “human chorionic gonadotropin” in urine and change that binding into a measurable signal like a colour change or digital readout. Traditionally when you want to make antibodies you needed to inject the target molecule into an animal, wait until that animal creates antibodies against that target (because it’s a foreign entity), then take the blood out of the animal and extract the antibodies. Even outside of the obvious ethical considerations for such a process, of course it’s desirable to take animals out of the equation to try and increase manufacturing output and better define the proteins that are created. One way to do this is through recombinant biotech. In brief, you can take cells and change their genome so they start making the antibody you’re interested in, which is flexible and efficient.
Niamh’s role:
Niamh spent a year with Animal Free Research UK at the start of her PhD (2021-2022) where she started working on this initiative with a lovely chap called Jarrod Bailey, who is now at the “Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.” AFRUK, through their Science Manager Dr Stephanie Modi, have made something very impressive; a sleek, easy to navigate, database with lots of info on ways to access recombinant antibodies and mimetics. Check it out!
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The above blog is a work by Michael Cook reporting the group’s specific involvement in the initial phases of the database development process and is not a view given by Animal Free Research UK. Michael has no formal involvement with the charity outside of project AFR19-20294 which supports Niamh’s PhD research alongside the Hertfordshire Science Partnership. Michael’s views are his own and not a representation of either Animal Free Research UK or University College London.
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