Antibody research for cancer treatment

At Miltenyi, we offer a complete workflow for your antibody discovery research.

Whether you start from tissue samples, which need to be dissociated first, or from blood products – We offer optimized solutions to clear your samples for the following B cell application steps. Your workflow might be based on B cell sorting followed by BCR sequencing. Or you might perform magnetic B cell separation, followed by B cell culture and flow cytometry–based binder selection. We support your preferred workflow, as well as subsequential functional testing of lead candidates.

Sorting of highly pure B cells from PBMCs 

The MACSQuant Tyto Cell Sorter enables gentle sorting of CD19⁺ B cells from PBMCs, resulting in a highly pure and viable target fraction.

Read an interview on how the MACSQuant Tyto Cell Sorter is helping a Danish research team to sort antigen-specific B cells here.

Cell separation directly from blood products 

Developing antibody-based therapies can be labor intensive and time consuming. With our StraightFrom® MicroBead Kits, your workflow is streamlined and saves valuable hands-on time bringing you closer to your new discovery. StraightFrom MicroBeads allow magnetic cell separation directly from human blood products, such as whole blood, buffy coat, leukoreduction system chambers (LRSCs) and leukopaks. CD19⁺ and CD138⁺ B cells can be purified using the autoMACS® Pro Separator, the MultiMACS™ Cell24 Separator Plus, or manual separators.

Isolation of human CD19⁺ cells from whole blood

The StraightFrom LRSC CD19 MicroBead Kits enables isolation of highly pure and viable B cells directly from blood products.

Standardized culture of primary human B cells 

Ex vivo cultivation is a suitable choice to increase B cells in numbers, especially antigen-specific B cells which are very low infrequency. Studying their antibody production, as well as specificity, is a very important step to develop antibody-based drugs. Our B Cell Expansion Kit, human, can streamline your workflow and simplify the process. The formulation offers the perfect solution to expand and activate human B cells from various sources. This enables expansion of B cells that are fully functional and ready for any downstream application. 

Reliable activation and expansion of B cells is a clear requirement for effective downstream experiments. The B Cell Expansion Kit, human is optimized for primary B cell expansion in vitro.

Standardized B cell expansion 

Within only 14 days, the B Cell Expansion Kit, human enables a 10-fold expansion of B cells. Furthermore, the kit offers a standardized system for reproducible conditions. 

The most important step in antibody discovery research is the identification of lead candidates. To identify antigen-specific antibodies in tissue culture supernatants, flow cytometry analysis can be used. With the MACSQuant® X Flow Cytometer, these assays can be performed in a fast, standardized, and automated manner. This generates high-content information, which is both reproducible and reliable. The MACSQuant X Instrument is equipped with a syringe needle capable of volumetric pipetting, thereby enabling absolute counting from sample volumes starting at 5 µL. The instrument is fully automated in its calibration and compensation procedures, on top it’s pre-set templates, and instrument settings significantly reduce experiment setup and optimization time. 

Reliable high-throughput analysis 

The MACSQuant X Flow Cytometer enables reliable sample analysis even for high-throughput analyses like lead candidate identification. The instrument can analyze a 384-well plate in less than 60 minutes and a 96-well plate in less than 15 minutes. 

Identification of novel molecular targets for immunotherapies, as well as the analysis and diagnosis of cancers, is a crucial step in cancer research. It is vital for developing monoclonal antibody-based drugs, such as immune checkpoint antibodies, but also for other immunotherapies such as CAR T cell therapy. 

However, these approaches are often hampered by a lack of technologies that allow for sensitive and comprehensive multiplexed protein analysis. The MACSima™ Imaging Platform enables high-content, cyclic fluorescence–based imaging of individual biological samples in a fully automated fashion. 

In this example, the MACSima Imaging Platform was applied for identification of new glioblastoma-specific markers. Screening of 96 antibodies led to the identification of new marker candidates.