March 2000 News

Researchers Discover Method that May Lead to Efficient and Inexpensive Antibody Substitutes

March 1, 2000

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have discovered a method that may lead to the efficient and inexpensive production of synthetic antibody substitutes for use in medical diagnostics, biotechnology, and biomedical research.

Reporting in the January issue of Nature Biotechnology, the investigators explain how they set up a selection system to find peptides that mimic antibodies by binding to specific peptide epitopes—amino acid compounds that can combine with antibodies. The scientists wanted to find relatively small molecules, such as peptides, that could substitute for antibodies.

They genetically engineered bacteria so that, if a cell contained the desired epitope-binding peptide, it would survive an otherwise lethal viral infection. This provided a method to rapidly and easily sort through a large collection of peptides for those few with the desired epitope-binding properties.

"The core of this research is to devise a way to design relatively small molecules that aren't proteins but can recognize a particular run of amino acids, or an epitope," says Thomas Kodadek, professor of internal medicine and biochemistry and an investigator for UT Southwestern's Center for Biomedical Inventions. "This is important because antibodies are large and must be produced using animals, so they are difficult and expensive to make. They are also fragile, which limits their application outside of carefully controlled laboratory environments."

The full text of this news release is available on the web here.