The challenges in RUO antibody development (and how to overcome them!)
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- How do you ensure your antibody portfolio meets researcher needs?
- The challenges in managing cost, time and uncertainty
- How can using reagent data help?
In a large and competitive market, producing new research antibodies (and other reagents) is a process filled simultaneously with risk and great opportunity to help researchers.
Today we focus on RUO antibody development and explore the big challenge of target selection and producing antibodies researchers really need. We also dive into other considerations, including:
- The time and cost involved
- Making a competitive product in a saturated market
At the bottom of this blog, we also highlight a potential solution to reduce risks involved.
Why is it important to choose the right antibody to develop?
Developing new research antibodies is an expensive and lengthy process, making decisions around which product to develop paramount!
The time involved in bringing a new commercial research antibody to market
Producing polyclonal antibodies, monoclonal antibodies and recombinant antibodies can take between a few months to over a year [1,2].
Plus, performing validation tests (an essential step to ensure an antibody is specific and selective to its target) is a long process.
This estimate does not take into account the time product teams also invest into choosing which antibodies are the right ones to develop. Quantifiable insight on the market can help to streamline the process.
Costs associated with antibody development
On top of the considerable time investment, antibodies are expensive reagents to produce.
Custom antibody costs can be around a few thousand to over ten thousand dollars for a monoclonal antibody, and $1k for a polyclonal [3]. We have heard reports of costs exceeding $50k to bring a new commercial catalogue antibody to market.
For the antibody user themselves, it can cost between hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars per milligram of antibody [4].
Given the high stakes here, considering how an antibody will fit into the wider market, now and in the future, is helpful.
Developing antibodies to meet researcher needs
Given the scope of work antibodies can be used in, making new reagents is not straightforward.
Let’s say you are at the start of the process of developing a new catalogue antibody. You may begin by asking your team or researchers you have contact with:
- Which targets are scientists interested in?
- Are there protein targets that are being studied more often in recent years?
- Are there targets that do not have many (or any) research antibodies against them?
It can be challenging to answer these questions with confidence. Particularly if they are based on the opinions of a few people, they are highly unlikely to be a reliable guide to the entire market.
Understanding trends in research use, through quantitative data combined with qualitative surveys, can help to direct this initial stage of antibody product development.
Once you’ve established a suitable target, you may then need to decide which type of antibody to develop.
Is there a need for a new recombinant antibody? These are expensive to produce but offer a highly attractive renewable choice for researchers. Are there currently no polyclonal products out there, and does this gap in the market need addressing quickly?
To ensure that new products meet researcher needs, the questions do not stop there.
Other considerations include the species reactivity and applications to test your antibody in, to name just a couple of examples.
Without insight into how researchers are using antibodies and what is currently out there, this process is very much like driving an expensive car down a country road in the dark…
There are also decisions to be made about which applications to prioritise for validation testing. Testing antibodies for specificity and sensitivity to the target in the appropriate application is really important for researchers.
This step can drive research outcomes and your company growth, helping researchers choose the right antibodies for their needs. Determining which applications scientists are using most frequently can help prioritisation.
Making competitive antibodies
So, let’s say you have decided upon a product that you think will meet current and future research needs. Great! How do you ensure that your antibody is competitive in a market with so many players and options?
On our research antibody search engine, we list over 7 million products from 348 different antibody companies.
There are often hundreds or thousands of antibodies available to scientists against a single target. To illustrate this, we picked out three popular targets on our search engine, finding:
- 6633 results for antibodies against CD31
- 4450 results for antibodies against GFAP
- 3628 results for antibodies against CD68
This is why it can be useful to consider if there is a gap in the market for a new product, for variations on the product, or if you are producing a better version to top cited products.
This could include developing antibodies against the same target but in a different host species or target species, or to a different location in the protein, to the popular competitor products.
It could also mean developing a product that is missing from your current portfolio, where there is demand.
How can using reagent data help with these product development challenges?
Using reagent data is one good solution to overcome many of these challenges.
If you can gain insight into how scientists have used different antibodies over the years, in different research areas, applications and against many targets, you can understand trends and predict what they may require in the future.
Understanding reagent use can also help you spot gaps in the market, or in your current portfolio, to help you to make more competitive products and justify development time and costs.
CiteAb is one such reagent data provider. We collect data by mining citations (instances of product use) from the scientific literature.
Get in touch for a demo of our data to see the many different ways it can be used in product development, and beyond.
References
- https://info.gbiosciences.com/blog/recombinant-antibodies-an-overview#:~:text=Using%20recombinant%20antibody%20technology%2C%20an,to%20produce%20a%20suitable%20antibody.
- https://blog.cellsignal.com/antibody-essentials-part-3-how-antibody-technologies-evolved#part_three_link_two
- https://www.biomatik.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-custom-antibody/
- https://dcndx.com/blog/make-buy-antibody/
