A serendipitous discovery in the early 90s at the Free University of Brussels resulted in Dr. Hamers-Casterman finding a new class of antibodies lacking the light chains in the blood of camels (1). These heavy-chain antibodies (HcAbs) can be found in camels, dromedaries, and all the new world camels (llamas, alpacas, guanacos & vicuñas).
The minimal domain necessary to bind an epitope/antigen is what is today known as single domain antibodies (sdAbs), variable domain of the heavy chain (VHH), and also commercially named Nanobodies® (trademark of Ablynx, now Sanofi).
NanoTag Biotechnologies GmbH has extensive experience and proprietary technologies to screen, select, engineer, validate and produce specific nanobodies for various applications.
SdAbs keep gaining popularity in multiple applications, from super-resolution microscopy (2–6), affinity purifications (7–10), crystallography (9,11–13), biosensors (14–16), cryo-EM (8,17,18) to medical diagnostics (19,20), clinical imaging (21,22), theragnostic (23), monoclonal and cell therapies (24).
This broad spectrum of applications is due to several unique features that make them attractive when compared to conventional antibodies.
In NanoTag Biotechnologies we can discover tailor made sdAbs against your protein of interest, or you can search for shelf product in our validated portafolio. The sdAbs that are directly coupled to fluorophores can be found as FluoTags® or if immobilized in agarose and magnetic beads can be found as Selectors.
In addition we offer them also as unconjugated sdAbs, bearing biotin, cup- per-free click chemistry DBCO, enzymes like the Horse Radish Peroxidase (HRP) or even with different specieis Fc domains (Minibodies).
If you need a different functional molecule on them, please contact us with your idea.