Blog
Nov 11, 2019

Antibody Discovery and B Cell Profiling Using Single Cell Immune Sequencing

Olivia Habern

Antibodies are critical instruments of the adaptive immune system, and have been leveraged for many innovative therapeutics, including cancer immunotherapies, and vaccines for infectious diseases. Precluding the use of antibodies in modern medicine, however, have been many innovations in antibody discovery.

Standard methods of antibody discovery include hybridoma fusion and combinatorial display. Now, researchers from Vanderbilt University have conducted work that suggests single cell transcriptomic methods may represent an emerging mode of antibody discovery.

Dr. Ivelin Georgiev, Assistant Professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology and of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, and members of his laboratory, including graduate student Ian Setliff, have developed an unbiased, high-throughput method to screen the antibody repertoire of single B cells. The method, LIBRA-seq, uses the 10x Genomics Chromium Single Cell Immune Profiling Solution to recover DNA-barcoded antigens and B-cell receptor sequences simultaneously, overcoming the limitations of fluorescence based screening methods which can only mark a select number of antigens at a time.

The research team recently used LIBRA-seq to screen B cells from human HIV-infected samples, and identified a diverse panel of new antibodies, including broadly neutralizing antibodies.

Learn more about their methods and this exciting discovery in our upcoming 10x Genomics webinar, hosted by GEN, on November 14, 2019, at 8:00 AM (PT). Hear from Ian Setliff and Dr. Ivelin Georgiev as they answer your questions about using single cell immune profiling for antibody discovery.

Register today! 

To learn more about immunology solutions at 10x Genomics, visit 10xgenomics.com/immunology.