Single-domain antibody discovery services tailored to your needs

Our experience combined with proprietary technologies provides an excellent choice for your nanobody discovery projects. The NanoTag discovery workflow is highly customizable to the needs of your project, ranging from complex counter selections steps, promoting conformation-specific epitopes, special salt and pH working conditions for binding, and other screening variations that have been carried out successfully in our facility.

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Highly experienced scientists, dedicated laboratories, and our own animal research farm will facilitate your challenging project

With a highly customizable service, we can assist at every level of a nanobody discovery project, from antigen design and production, tailored screenings, to candidate validation and scale-up production.


We offer tailored discovery platforms to meet your project’s specific needs:

Alpaca Immunization

A complete nanobody discovery project, including immunization, library construction, panning, and clone delivery, can be completed within four to five months. Each custom project consists of several key phases. These may involve antigen production in prokaryotic or eukaryotic cells, whole-cell immunization, or mRNA immunization using lipid nanoparticles. Additionally, the project includes the design and implementation of a tailored immunization protocol in alpacas, followed by the assessment of immune responses in the sera.
Following immunization, nanobody repertoires are cloned using proprietary in-house phagemid technology. The panning process can be tailored to target specific epitopes or to select for the desired off-rate. Sequence analysis and annotation of nanobody candidates are performed to identify optimal leads. Scalable production is conducted in a 96-well format, and both the purified nanobodies and their corresponding sequences are delivered to the customer. The binding kinetics of nanobody candidates are validated through ELISA and BLI assays, ensuring high-affinity interactions for further development.

Proprietary Synthetic Library

A synthetic nanobody library offers numerous benefits for rapidly identifying lead candidates, primarily due to its ability to harness a vast diversity of nanobodies in a controlled, animal-free setting. NanoTag maximizes this complexity by integrating ribosome display technology with phage display, enhancing the selection process and enabling the identification of high-affinity nanobodies. This combined approach is particularly valuable for discovering nanobody candidates that are unsuitable for traditional immunization-based methods. By using a synthetic library, the discovery process becomes not only faster but also more ethical and flexible, providing a powerful platform for identifying novel nanobodies with precise binding properties.

Naïve Library

Using a naïve nanobody library for lead discovery projects presents several distinct advantages. A key benefit is that a naïve library, sourced from non-immunized animals, offers a broad and diverse repertoire of nanobodies capable of targeting a wide range of antigens without requiring prior immunization. This approach is especially valuable for identifying leads against challenging or unknown targets, including those that may not provoke a strong immune response through conventional immunization methods. Moreover, naïve libraries enable the rapid screening of a vast array of nanobody candidates, increasing the likelihood of discovering novel binders with desirable traits such as high affinity, specificity, and stability. The use of a pre-existing library also eliminates the need for time-consuming animal immunization, significantly accelerating the discovery process while conserving resources.


Discovery projects can be stopped at different exit points if requested following reports at defined milestones. For example, if the immune response of the immunized animals is not strong enough after the immunization phase, there will be the option of stopping or prolonging the immunization.

NanoTag has all the necessary permission from the authorities to perform immunizations only minutes away from our main laboratories. This ensures the best blood quality possible and RNA preservation, which results in an exceptional diversity of nanobodies needed for a thorough and deep screening.

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Our fully customizable service allows clients to decide at which stage in the discovery process the material should be transferred (blood, cDNA, library, or single clones delivery)
1-4 weeks
Antigen:
The client provides the antigens needed for the immunization of animals and for the screening phase.
Alternatively, NanoTag can produce antigens for you as an optional R&D service.
6-12 weeks
Immunization:
Our experienced scientists will coordinate with you the best-suited immunization scheme to perform in our research farm.
1-2 weeks
Library generation:
After the final boost, 150 ml of blood is drawn from each animal, and PBMCs are separated to finally make an mRNA extraction and produce a cDNA library using a special set of primers that results in an enhanced VHH diversity.
4-6 weeks
Phage display screening:
We have optimized several steps from the conventional phage display procedures. Starting with the generation of an enhanced VHH library diversity at the cDNA level due to our primers, but also, we have optimized the transformation into bacteria to minimize this bottleneck in diversity.
Additionally, we have developed a series of antigen immobilization methodologies that allow very clean panning rounds, maximizing the retention of relevant clones.
Optional
Positive clones first validation in vitro:
After obtaining the sequences of positively selected clones and grouped in families, non-redundant clones are produced & purified in a mid-scale for more thorough in vitro testing.
Basic validation will be performed in ELISA, using ramp concentrations of antigen to obtain a relative affinity between candidates. More thorough and custom validations are at this stage also possible (e.g. affinity measurements, client-specific testing, etc.).