Non-human primate immune libraries combined with germline humanization: an (almost) new, and powerful approach for the isolation of therapeutic antibodies.

Panning of libraries constructed from immunised non-human primates (NHP) has not been widely used, even though this has proven to be a successful approach for the isolation of human-like antibody fragments with affinities in the nanomolar to the picomolar range. As recently demonstrated, after initial isolation of antibodies with such high affinities, germline humanization may be applied to these Fabs or scFvs to increase the similarity of their framework regions with those encoded by human germline genes. 'Germlinized' antibody fragments may be converted to full size IgGs; indications are given that these IgGs could be better tolerated in clinical use than human antibodies. The use of the combination of NHP immune libraries and germline humanization thus may compete with use of libraries of human origin, whether naïve or immune, and with synthetic libraries. In this report, the various approaches will be compared, and advantages of the two-step NHP-based method, as well as corresponding intellectual property aspects, will be discussed.