
Recombinant Antibody Production Core
Kevin McBride, Ph.D.
Director
- Research Resources
- Core Facilities and Services
- Recombinant Antibody Production Core
Antibodies are indispensable tools in biomedical research, medical diagnostics, and human disease therapy with countless research and clinical applications. Antibodies allow researchers to identify, purify and track molecular targets, but it is not always possible to obtain a supply of replenishable, consistently reliable, and molecularly characterized antibodies. This deficit hampers research progress and contributes to experimental irreproducibility as antibodies may lack the desired target specificity, can vary from lot-to-lot, and may change over time.
Most contemporary antibody production methodologies are slow, expensive, low-throughput, and cannot guarantee the resulting antibodies will be suited for their intended purpose. Many commercial antibodies have not been defined at the molecular level and can be of poor quality which wastes precious research resources and contributes to the so-called “reproducibility crisis” in biomedical research.
To help combat these issues, 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 commonly available. The Recombinant Antibody Production Core (RAPC) is helping provide this resource by making custom, sequence-defined, recombinant antibodies quickly and inexpensively, using their proprietary, high-throughput methodology. The RAPC’s unique pipeline has enabled a number of collaborations focused on profiling patient tumor B cells, engineering antibodies to bear one or more epitope tags, capturing antigen-specific plasma cells, and creating modification-specific antibodies.
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. Use of this core facility is open to all academic researchers in Texas.
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.
Research Laboratory Manager and 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.
Senior Research Scientist and 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.
Melissa Simper, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist and iLab and Project
Coordinator
msimper@mdanderson.org
713-794-3977
Expertise in core user management, project management, and iLab integration.
Mark Bedford, Ph.D.
Professor, Collaborator
Expertise in protein arginine methylation and managing and developing a CPRIT-supported core facility.