Generation of Affinity Reagents to Challenging Targets Through Phage Display

While biomarker discovery has exploded in recent years, it has not translated to the production of many sensitive and specific diagnostic and biochemical tests. This is in part due to the technical challenge of producing robust assays with low false positive and low false negative results. Antibody binding reagents needed for these assays are difficult to obtain as animal immunizations, antibody collection and purification, and validation require extensive time and labor and often still result in non-specific, off-target, and/or low affinity binders. This work demonstrates that by deploying and improving phage display to generate recombinant affinity reagents, we can reduce the time needed to produce high quality reagents for robust, sensitive diagnostic and biochemical assays.