Course Lectures
- An introduction to the natural role of antibodies in the adaptive immune response
- An introduction to the genetics of antibody diversity and class switching
- A detailed view of antibody structure and structural variability
- An explanation of why antibodies make good lab reagents, diagnostics and drugs
- How antibodies are used as drugs
- The problems of using antibodies as in vivo drugs (size and immunogenicity) and routes to solve these (chimerics, humanization and 'fully human' antibodies).
- New developments in antibody formats
- Examples of the production and use of antibodies as therapeutics
- Methods to model the structure of antibodies and how these differ from normal comparative homology modelling
- An introduction to intellectual property (and patents in particular) and how this applies to antibody-based drugs
- An analysis of biopharmaceutical court cases related to infringement and equivalence, sufficiency, novelty, inventive step and industrial application
Course Workshops
Course workshops will offer hands-on experience in:
- Exploring the abYsis database and workbench
- Analysing antibody sequences
- Standard numbering of antibody sequences
- Understanding antibody structure
- Exploration of unusual sequence features and mapping these to structure
Opportunities
- Discussions and Q&A sessions - an opportunity for you to ask questions and for the lecturers to help you with your particular needs.
- A reception party on the first evening - opportunities to network