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Resource Library AI Antibody Library Screening: Rapid Cell-Free Triage Before CHO Scale-Up
White Paper AI Antibody Library Screening: Rapid Cell-Free Triage Before CHO Scale-Up Chris Icke, Ania Boczkaj, Sumit Kalsi, Andreas Waeber, Raman Pandey, Mozhdeh Khajvand, and Ruben Tomás Nuclera Ltd, Cambridge, UK

AI Antibody Library Screening: Rapid Cell-Free Triage Before CHO Scale-Up

Artificial intelligence can generate thousands of promising antibody variants, but pushing these in silico libraries straight into mammalian cell expression creates a major validation bottleneck.

This white paper shows how to relieve that bottleneck by inserting a 96-plex cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) triage step upstream of CHO scale-up. By expressing, screening, and ranking libraries with CFPS first, discovery teams filter out AI-generated non-binders early and reserve premium mammalian capacity strictly for evidence-backed hits, while returning both positive and negative data to accelerate model retraining.

In this white paper, you'll discover:

  • A rapid sequence-to-decision workflow: How to take 188 digital VH/VL sequences across two independent AI panels (anti-PD-1 and anti-IL-6), express them as full-length IgG, triage them, and convert them into decision-grade SPR kinetics — from 14 business days.
  • Near-perfect expression success: How CFPS expressed 186 of 188 variants as intact full-length IgG (99%), with 98% build success on the anti-PD-1 library (92 of 94) and 100% on the anti-IL-6 library (94 of 94).
  • Massive downstream savings: How the binary triage screen identified and diverted 139 non-binders away from costly CHO workflows, including an 83% non-binder rate in the anti-IL-6 library, preventing weeks of wasted mammalian expression and budget.
  • Reliable kinetic concordance: How cell-free results delivered up to 94% binding concordance with mammalian CHO reference datasets (91% for anti-PD-1 vs CHO BLI, 94% for anti-IL-6 vs CHO SPR), giving teams data they can trust for early hit triage.

Why It Matters

Fast, predictive triage protects your mammalian pipeline. By replacing slow, unvetted CHO screening with a rapid cell-free binary triage and focused SPR workflow, discovery teams can stop wasted spend, trust their data, and focus expensive downstream resources exclusively on the right constructs.

Contributors

Chris Icke - Senior Scientist Workflow Development in Protein Science
Ania Boczkaj - Senior Scientist, Antibodies in Protein Science
Sumit Kalsi - Associate Director Product Research in DMF Research
Andreas Waeber - Senior Software Developer in Workflow Software
Raman Pandey - Principal Scientist in Protein Science
Mozhdeh Khajvand - Senior Workflow Engineer in Integration
Ruben Tomás - Sr Product Marketing Manager

Download: AI Antibody Library Screening: Rapid Cell-Free Triage Before CHO Scale-Up