Isolation of human single chain antibodies (scFv) against human TNF-α from human peripheral blood lymphocyte-SCID mice

Abstract

By developing an appropriate immunization protocol for SCID (hu-PBL-SCID) mice engrafted with human peripheral blood lymphocytes in combination with scFv phage display library, we were able to establish an efficient strategy to obtain human scFv clones against a human self-antigen, TNF-α. The mice pretreated with γ-radiation (3Gy) and anti-asialo GM1 antibody were immunized with a mixture of human TNF-α-keyhole limpet hemocyanin and Freund’s adjuvant. Human antibody maturation was suggested to be induced in the mice with the immunization protocol. The scFv clones obtained from the mice were shown to exhibit binding affinities in the range of 10⁷–10⁸ M⁻¹. Together with our previously published work on the isolation of respiratory syncytial virus neutralizing scFvs, the results of this study have implicated that this combined approach is one of the effective alternatives for the cloning of human monoclonal antibodies specific for a wide range of antigens of interest.