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University of Illinois Debuts oPool+ for Rapid, Low-Cost Antibody Mapping

A Science Translational Medicine paper outlines a scalable route to faster antibody candidate selection across diseases.

Overview

  • The oPool+ display platform rapidly synthesizes and assays large sets of natively paired antibodies in parallel.
  • In a proof-of-concept, researchers built about 300 antibody variants and tested them against multiple influenza hemagglutinin variants.
  • The team reported more than 5,000 binding tests completed in three to five days of hands-on work, enabling quick specificity profiling.
  • Materials costs fell by an estimated 80–90% compared with traditional one-at-a-time antibody workflows.
  • Findings included shared binding features across antibodies from different people, with plans to scale to thousands of antibodies, broaden to other pathogens and cancer, and validate AI prediction models.