Antibody Drug Discovery
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Overview

Antibody Drug Discovery Process

The overall discovery process for Ab therapeutics can be broadly divided into five stages:

Often time, screening, hit generation & lead selection are also collectively referred to as "Lead Discovery". Activities leading up to the selection of the clinical candidate are referred to as "preclinical" work/research. While the language and choice of words changes from one publication to another, the concept remains the same.

Figure 1: Overview of discovery process for therapeutic antibodies leading to the selection of a clinical candidate is shown in the workflow above. Key activities at each of the five stages are listed in the text boxes.

But How Does One Decide Whether to Pursue Ab or Small Molecule

The answer is that it depends on the target. Small molecules penetrate the cell whereas large molecules (Ab therapeutics) typically target cell surface molecules like receptors or tumor antigens. And hence research will dictate what kind of intervention is required in a particular disease pathway. See major differences between small molecule and large molecule research in the table below.

Table 1: Small molecule drugs vs large molecule drugs.

The previous section in this series is "Antibody Formats". To review, Click Here.

Antibody Drug Discovery Resources and Services

You can also view our Recombinant Antibody Service Selection Guide to identify services that are the best match for your application.

Quotations and Ordering

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