Alpaca Serum Antibodies Decoded with Rapid Novor’s De Novo Protein Sequencing Technology

Rapid Novor Inc., the world’s leader in antibody protein sequencing using mass spectrometry, announced today that its REpAb® antibody discovery platform was used to successfully sequence 10 unique nanobodies directly from an alpaca’s serum polyclonal antibody proteins. Furthermore, the 10 nanobodies were recombinantly produced, and the binding analysis shows that 9 out of 10 nanobodies bind to the antigen with picomolar affinity.

“To our knowledge, this is yet another first-in-the-world achievement that an alpaca VHH pAb was de novo sequenced directly from the serum protein without access to any genomic information.” said Dr. Bin Ma, President and Chief Scientist of Rapid Novor Inc. “In contrast to previous studies we have performed, this alpaca pAb was generated against a large protein antigen, and the resulting pAb mixture is quite complex. I am excited to see that we still pulled this off. Antigen-specific antibodies in the serum are usually abundant, but antigen-specific circulating B cells are not. Our unique ability to de novo sequence functional antibody proteins out of a complex mixture gives us an edge, especially in situations where the B cells are hard to obtain.”

In the past 12 months, Rapid Novor’s REpAb® technology has been on a rapid advancement trajectory. In May 2021, the company became the first to decode rabbit polyclonal antibodies using only proteomics. Six months later, in November, goat polyclonal antibody proteins were directly sequenced, and this was described as the Holy Grail of reagent antibody technology.

Rapid Novor aims to further expand the technologies to work with additional species and varieties of antigens. Compared to NGS and cell-based discovery methods, REpAb® is well positioned to be a viable orthogonal antibody discovery platform to directly sequence those highly potent and highly developable antibodies, which have gone through the natural selection and maturation processes of the immune system.

The company has conducted 10+ polyclonal antibody sequencing and discovery campaigns in the first six months of 2022, involving a variety of species including mice, dogs, chickens, goats and now camelids. The team is actively working with pharmaceutical companies and biotech partners to further integrate its REpAb® platform into the antibody discovery process.