I recall having to make hundreds of custom peptides, and even though we used an automated peptide synthesizer rather than doing it by hand like another lab in the building, making a dozen peptides at a time still took hours on the machine and then another couple days for the purification and lyophilization processes. My mentor and I briefly joked about using bacteria and a polycistronic construct to just have the little guys use their ribosomes to do it for us, but the purification process probably would have been impractical. This does make me appreciate the wonders of natural biosynthetic machinery, and I promise there is a point here because we still use animal hosts to initially produce antibodies. Today, let's explore the process by which most commercial and custom antibodies are still produced, including here at ABclonal!

When I was an aspiring (much younger) scientist, one of the challenges was finding quality antibodies to accommodate our research group’s high-throughput Western blotting platform ¹ while studying signaling pathways in cancer cell lines. When I got into marketing, I learned about ABclonal’s high-quality, high-specificity, and high-affinity antibody products. I really wish that I had access to these products when I was doing my thesis research! With a team of passionate, capable scientists supporting these quality products, I was thrilled at the opportunity to be part of this company and to help spread ABclonal’s brand to the scientific community.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has raised global health concerns. As case numbers continue to climb, there is an urgent need for an active drugs against SARS-CoV-2. The development of new drugs is time-consuming and costly, and the safety of new drugs is paramount. Therefore, the strategy of drug repurposing represents one of the fastest approaches to have an active drug to fight SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a matter of fact, in silico repurposing approaches have found increasing popularity during the COVID-19 epidemic [1], especially with the great breakthrough achieved using 3CLpro as a target to screen drugs. By the end of 2021, the FDA has authorized the first oral antiviral drug Paxlovid, produced by Pfizer, to treat COVID-19. Due to that much of the scientific and clinical work on drug repurposing or drug screening against SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 is still ongoing, in this blog we will review the latest progress on the potential targets, including 3CLpro, for the drug discovery or intervention of COVID-19.

ABclonal has developed over 12,000 high quality antibody products since its inception in 2011. With this significant and time-tested experience, you can rest assured that ABclonal is relentless in its focus on the production and development of quality antibodies. Let’s further our understanding of antibodies by taking a more in-depth look at their structure, function, and uses in research.