Designing and optimizing library selection strategies for generating high-affinity antibodies.

Since its invention at the beginning of the 1990s, antibody phage display has revolutionized the generation of monoclonal antibodies and their engineering. It is now possible to create antibodies binding to any chosen target antigen without the use of laboratory animals or hybridomas, in a system that completely by-passes the immune system. Making antibodies from single-pot phage libraries, and improving their affinity up to the picomolar range if necessary, has never appeared easier. In this review, a variety of phage library-based strategies for the isolation of high-affinity antibodies are presented.