WP7 - Germ-free Antibodies

WP7 focuses on the large-scale production of novel antibodies using germ-free chickens. 

To enable isolation of stem cells under GMP conditions it will be necessary to produce large quantities of GMP-grade isolation reagent. The Ovagen Germ-Free process is a fully GMP compliant procedure and will enable antibodies identified in earlier work packages to be produced in gram quantities. Antibodies produced with this method will be free of any potential microbiological contamination which could potentially be passed onto the MSCs being isolated.

Chicken embryos will be infected with the DNA encoding the antibody of interest in a lentiviral vector. Integration of the antibody DNA into the germ line of the chickens over several generations will produce stable transgenic chicken lines able to express the MSC-specific antibody. By using a promoter sequence which is specifically expressed in the oviduct cells of the chicken it will be possible to direct the expressed protein into the egg white of the transgenic chickens. The recombinant antibody can then simply be extracted from the egg white, using well established techniques, and passed back to WP8 for the GMP isolation of MSCs.

The generation of transgenic chicken lines is being carried out in collaboration with Professor Helen Sang of the Roslin Institute, Scotland.