Fast, Gentle and Easy Single Cell Isolation for Monoclonal Antibody Discovery

Monoclonal antibodies are essential for modern drug development and diagnostics. Scientists have traditionally identified antigen-specific monoclonal antibodies with two approaches, each with significant drawbacks that limit the efficiency of antibody discovery.

Screening for hybridoma clones. This entails isolating B cells and fusing them with immortalized myeloma cells. Traditionally, limiting dilutions are used to isolate the desired clones. However, limiting dilution is inherently limited by the Poisson distribution, making this approach highly labor-intensive and time-consuming.

Screening for antigen-specific immune cells. Antigen-specific B cells can be directly isolated by FACS instruments, which sort cells at very high pressure (up to 70 psi), resulting in reduced cell viability. Additionally, these instruments are very difficult to operate and prone to clogging. 

Ready to Streamline Your Antibody Workflow?

• Namocell’s Single Cell Dispensers are used to isolate single cells for downstream analysis and antibody discovery and production.

Two methods for monoclonal antibody production are depicted above: the creation of immortalized myeloma cell lines (left), and a screening process to isolate antigen-specific B-cells that produce the desired IgG antibodies (right). In both workflows, Namocell’s Single Cell Dispensers are used to isolate single cells for downstream analysis.

Namocell Benefits

Hana Single Cell Dispenser
Gentle Single Cell Sorting

Gentle

- Gentle sorting (<2 psi) preserves cell viability
- Higher clonality
- Better outgrowth

Rapid single cell isolation

Fast

- Quickly isolate rare antigen-specific B cells
- Process up to 1M cells in 5 min

Automate Isolation Cell Analysis

Easy

- Quick setup in under 3 min
- No calibration and no maintenance

Isolate Single Cells Easily

Sterile

- Compact size fitting in tissue culture hood
- Sterile and disposable cell cartridge

Dispensing Efficiency

Namocell Single Cell Dispensers are highly efficient and consistent at dispensing single cells. With dispensing efficiency (percentage of dispensed wells with single cells) of 80-90% for CHO cells compared to ~30% using manual pipetting.

CHO cell dispensing using Namocell compared to manual pipetting for cho cell line development

Single B Cell Isolation

• Immunoglobulin gene expression from single memory B cells isolated using Namocell single cell dispenser for antibody development

Namocell’s Single Cell Dispenser was used to isolate single memory B cells for cDNA library construction. Expression of immunoglobulin genes via qPCR confirmed the uniform presence of heavy chain IGVH and the presence of either the kappa or lambda light chains (IGVK, IGVL) in eight representative single cells.

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