Submitting antibodies to binding arbitration

Stephen W Michnick1, Sachdev S Sidhu

  • 1Département de Biochimie and Robert Cedergren Centre, Bioinformatique and Genomics, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, Succursale centre-ville, Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7, Canada. stephen.michnick@umontreal.ca

For the last 30 years, the production of affinity reagents and particularly antibodies for research and therapeutic applications has been dominated by hybridoma and polyclonal technologies, while more modern, reliable and inexpensive approaches have lagged. Here we discuss why this is the case and how a cultural shift in the biomedical research community could bring the new technologies for creating antibodies and other tailor-designed binding proteins into the mainstream, with the potential for myriad new applications in research and medicine.