Berkeley Lights Launches Next Generation B Cell Workflow to Accelerate Therapeutic Antibody Discovery

EMERYVILLE, Calif., Jan. 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Berkeley Lights, a leader in cell selection, launched its new product: Plasma B Discovery 2.0, an enhanced workflow for the company's Beacon® Optofluidic Platform. This next generation workflow enables customers to screen an even larger population of Plasma B cells to quickly find better antibody lead candidates.

Currently, hybridoma technology is the most commonly used method for antibody discovery. However, the hybridoma fusion process is inefficient and results in significant loss of B cell diversity. Plasma B Discovery 2.0 directly screens B cells immediately after organ harvest and cell purification without inefficient hybridoma fusion. Plasma B Discovery 2.0 users can screen broader B cell diversity to discover thousands of antigen-specific hits, perform assays to down-select lead candidates, and recover immense antibody sequence diversity in under 1 week.

"Antibody therapeutics for the next generation of diseases will be difficult to find, which is why it's important to access broad B cell diversity," said Dr. John Proctor, SVP Marketing at Berkeley Lights. "Our biology team and expert immunologists have developed a solution to not only increase the throughput of our current workflow, but also ensure that all hits identified are recoverable. The result is our customers have the best chance possible of finding the most valuable leads in every campaign."

Plasma B Discovery 2.0 is the first product that includes OptoSeq BCR™, Berkeley Lights' proprietary technology that enables simple and efficient recovery of paired heavy/light chain sequences. Diverse antibody sequences can be automatically recovered in under a week without sequence degradation due to cell death. By enabling access to greater B cell diversity, Berkeley Lights makes it more probable and more practical for customers to discover antibodies against difficult therapeutic targets, such as GPCRs and ion channels.

Plasma B Discovery 2.0 is available for purchase now and will be ready for shipment in March 2020. You can find more information here: https://www.berkeleylights.com/applications/antibody-discovery

About Berkeley Lights
Here at Berkeley Lights, we think cells are awesome! Cells are capable of manufacturing cures for diseases, fibers for clothing, energy in the form of biofuels, and food proteins for nutrition. So the question is, if nature is capable of manufacturing the products we need in a scalable way, why aren't we doing more of this? Well, the answer is that with the solutions available today, it is hard. It takes a long time to find the right cell for a specific job, costs lots of money, and if you have picked a suboptimal cell line, has a very low process yield. Berkeley Lights has the complete solution to find the best cells by functionally screening and recovering individual cells for antibody discovery, cell line development, T cell analysis, and synthetic biology. Our proprietary technology and Beacon^® and Lightning™ platforms accelerate the rate you can discover and develop cell-based products in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of conventional, legacy research methods. Using our tools and solutions, scientists can find the best cells, the first time they look. For more information, visit www.berkeleylights.com.

Berkeley Lights' Beacon^® platform is: For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

SOURCE Berkeley Lights

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