Recombinant Antibody Production Core
Kevin McBride, Ph.D.
Director
Antibodies are commonly used reagents in research, diagnostics and therapeutics and are indispensable tools for biomedical research and clinical applications. Antibodies allow researchers to identify, purify and track molecular targets. However, there is a paucity of consistently reliable, molecularly characterized, replenishable antibodies available to researchers.
Current antibody production methodologies are not only slow, expensive, and low-throughput, they also generate antibodies that may not be useful for their intended purpose, or that change over time. Further, many commercially available antibodies are molecularly ill-defined and/or of poor quality which wastes resources and contributes to the so-called “reproducibility crisis” in biomedical research.
To help combat this crisis, scientific leaders have called for researchers to use DNA sequence-defined antibodies produced via recombinant methods; however, cost-effective, custom recombinant antibody production is not readily available. Therefore, the Recombinant Antibody Production Core (RAPC) has developed a methodology to make custom, sequence-defined, recombinant antibodies, in a fast, inexpensive, and high-throughput manner.
The Recombinant Antibody Production Core (RAPC) is supported by a Core Facility Grant from the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (RP190507). Users of the core must cite this grant in publications using reagents generated by RAPC.
Contact Us
Kevin McBride, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Epigenetics and Molecular Carcinogenesis
Director, Recombinant Antibody Production Core
kmcbride@mdanderson.org
832-750-7195
Expertise in immunology, B cell biology and immunoglobulin diversification mechanisms, single cell immunoglobulin cloning and recombinant antibody production.
Joshua Plummer, M.S.
Core Operations Manager
jbplumme@mdanderson.org
832-750-7198
Manager of core projects and workflow; expertise in flow cytometry and cell sorting.
Monika Zelazowska, Ph.D.
Core Scientific Manager
mazelazowska@mdanderson.org
832-750-7199
Manager of the core's upstream workflow. Expertise in amplifying, sequencing, and analyzing antibody gene sequences to define the immunoglobulin repertoire.
Mark Bedford, Ph.D.
Professor, Collaborator
Expertise in protein arginine methylation and managing and developing a CPRIT-supported core facility.