The Key Lab of Antibody Technology of Ministry of Health was established in Aug 2005, and this is the first key lab qualified by the Ministry of Health among universities in Jiangsu Province. The purpose of establishing this lab is to meet the needs of our nation’s economic and social health’s development/requirements, in doing so, the application is the point, so we focus on developing antibody also including preparing antibody targeting drugs and diagnostic kits.
After many years’ development and hard work, we have already built 4 basic technological platforms, which are cell based engineering antibody technology, gene based engineering antibody, antibody drug development, and platforms respectively. As for cell engineering antibody, we have mastered the fusion technology including mice fusion, rabbit fusion methods so that get the corresponding monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies. Even the human-mice fusion we have tried. For gene engineering antibody, we are able to develop the small molecule antibody, antibody fragment, humanized antibody and fully human antibody. Furthermore, we can also enhance the antibody affinity and establish antibody library and expression and purification system for antibody. The brand-new efficient expression system which can apply to human antibody was also developed. The third platform is for antibody’s application, including antibody high throughput screening, identification, subtype identification, antibody-agent coupling, antibody drugs’ pre-clinical study, patent application and the drug registration. At the same time also developed in vitro diagnostic reagents and kits. The forth one is to deliver a platform where research, teaching and production could cooperate directly so that the academic outcomes could be applied from the bench to the bed more quickly. We have cooperated with more than ten research institutes and companies, respectively.
We have 22 people of permanent staff, including 11 professors, 2 associate professors and 6 lecturers; there are 16 people with doctor’s degree, four with a master’s degree. Recently, the laboratory has done a lot of work to cultivate graduate students, doctoral students and postdoctors. The laboratory has already trained 78 postgraduates, 32 doctors and 5 postdoctors.T he students has published 39 SCI papers as the first author. In addition, our laboratory has been granted 7 national patents and has applied for the national patent of 19 items.
Furthermore, our lab also cooperated with several international organizations, and several PhD students and teachers have been sent there for further study or short-term visit. At the same time, as an opening lab, we also welcome the scholars and the PhD students from all of the country, or even all of the world coming to do scientific research work in our lab.
We are going to develop more antibodies to satisfy the urgent needs for antibody drugs and diagnostic reagents in China. And also hope in the recent future that our laboratory will become the national key lab.