rabbit monoclonal antibody discovery service (recombinant)

A Quick and cheap way to make some antibodies

Long story short, polyclonal antibodies work for research but not for diagnostics. It is indeed a very low cost and fast turn around method for making antibodies against certain targets. Boster Bio does offer a $600 package for making a polyclonal antibody. Some claim that polyclonal antibodies suffer from specificity because they originate from multiple clones. This is a misconception because this "disadvantage" can be mitigated by using a single epitope for immunization and purification of the polyclonal antibodies. There are 3 main disadvantages of polyclonal antibodies in our experience. First is lot-to-lot variability. For any clinical assays or therapeutic assays it is almost impossible to get approval for an assay with polyclonal antibodies as core components. For research use however it is acceptable, and is often used as a stepping stone towards a monoclonal antibody. In our experience most antigens that prove to generate a good polyclonal antibody can also make a good monoclonal antibody. The second disadvantage is its inability to amplify only the best clones. This is important if the target protein is difficult to detect and requires high affinity. This is often the case in detecting secretive proteins and biomarkers in liquid biopsies, via ELISA or other similar immunoassays. During affinity chromatography, all antibodies with enough affinity to bind to the very concentrated antigens will be pulled out. Many of these antibodies might not have enough affinity to bind to the target protein in vivo where the target protein exists in low levels and masked by competing binding receptors in the matrix/in vivo environment.