Nanobodies are the smallest fragments of naturally occurring single-domain antibodies that have evolved to be fully functional in the absence of a light chain. Nanobodies are strictly monomeric, very stable, and highly soluble entities. We identified a nanobody with subnanomolar affinity for the human tumor-associated carcinoembryonic antigen. This nanobody was conjugated to Enterobacter cloaca...

Nanobodies are antigen-binding, single variable domain proteins derived from naturally-occurring, heavy chain only antibodies. They are highly soluble, stable, and can be linked to build multi-specific formats. Several Nanobodies are currently in clinical development in different therapeutic areas, for both chronic and acute applications. For the former, prolonged exposure is achieved by half-l...

Our objective is to develop a rapid and sensitive assay based on magnetic beads to detect the concentration of influenza H3N2. The possibility of using variable domain heavy-chain antibodies (nanobody) as diagnostic tools for influenza H3N2 was investigated. A healthy camel was immunized with inactivated influenza H3N2. A nanobody library of 8 × 10(8) clones was constructed and phage displayed....

BACKGROUND Bacterial surface display is an attractive technique for the production of cell-anchored, functional proteins and engineering of whole-cell catalysts. Although various outer membrane proteins have been used for surface display, an easy and versatile high-throughput-compatible assay for evaluating and developing surface display systems is missing. RESULTS Using a single domain antib...

Soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) is a potential pharmacological target for treating hypertension, vascular inflammation, cancer, pain, and multiple cardiovascular related diseases. A variable domain of the heavy chain antibody (termed single domain antibody (sdAb), nanobody, or VHH) possesses the advantages of small size, high stability, ease of genetic manipulation, and ability for continuous m...

BACKGROUND Variable domains of camelid heavy-chain antibodies, commonly named nanobodies, have high biotechnological potential. In view of their broad range of applications in research, diagnostics and therapy, engineering their stability is of particular interest. One important aspect is the improvement of thermostability, because it can have immediate effects on conformational stability, prot...

Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase 1 (PARP1) is a key player in DNA repair, genomic stability and cell survival and it emerges as a highly relevant target for cancer therapies. To deepen our understanding of PARP biology and mechanisms of action of PARP1-targeting anti-cancer compounds, we generated a novel PARP1-affinity reagent, active both in vitro and in live cells. This PARP1-biosensor is based o...

Background: Ramsar (Mazandran province) is known for its extremely high levels of natural background radiation. Although no excess cancer rate is reported in these areas by epidemiological studies, the study of tumor markers in the inhabitants of these areas may shed some light on the impact of high levels of background radiation on cancer induction. Materials and Methods: The level of backgrou...

In addition to its high affinity for antibody Fc domains, staphylococcal Protein A has been shown to bind certain Fab domains. We investigated this in order to develop a small, recombinant Protein A-binding alternative to immunoglobulin G (IgG) from nanobodies, single-domain antibodies derived from a camelid variant IgG's variable region. We engineered a nanobody with affinity solely for Protei...

Nanobodies are single chain antibodies that are uniquely produced in Camelidae, e.g. camels and llamas. They have the desirable features of small sizes (Mw < 14 kDa) and high affinities against antigens (Kd approximately nM), making them ideal as structural probes for biomedically relevant motifs both in vitro and in vivo. We have previously shown that nanobody binding to amyloidogenic human ly...