Stefanie Menzies

Project Title: Establishing an animal-free monoclonal antibody discovery and maturation pipeline to accelerate new therapies and diagnostic tools for NTDs.

Stephanie set up an animal-free monoclonal antibody discovery and maturation pipeline to accelerate new therapies and diagnostic tools for neglected tropical diseases.Antibodies can be used to treat or diagnose diseases. Creating these antibodies typically requires the use of lab animals, but animal-free alternatives are now possible. An antibody display library is being used - millions of yeast cells each display a unique antibody. We will test which antibodies interact with a relevant disease-specific protein or ‘target’, to identify the antibody with the strongest interaction. This antibody will be randomly mutated to identify better-performing mutants. The top performing antibodies will be tested for their ability to recognise or inhibit the target and further developed as treatments or diagnostic tests.