Dr. Hall’s laboratory has developed an innovative and unique “plug and play” cloning system for use in tobacco plants. This system is a cassette of DNA that contains all the elements required to produce a desired antibody in a quick and efficient manner.
The cassette contains constant or fixed regions that are a common backbone to a variety of therapeutic antibodies. The cassette system has been designed such that elements that differentiate one antibody from another (the variable regions) may be dropped into this backbone making the complete DNA required to produce the product antibody.
This proprietary methodology, which exploits well-understood techniques in molecular cloning, is designed to use a minimum number of steps, thus being fast and accurate. Further, the exploitation of a common protein backbone for multiple products will allow rapid production and safety evaluation for a pipeline of different therapeutic antibodies.
