Addgene Receives NIH BRAIN Initiative Grant to Create Open-Access Recombinant Antibody Resource

WATERTOWN, Mass. - May 25, 2021 - PRLog -- Addgene, the nonprofit plasmid repository, has been awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a recombinant antibody resource. The grant will be funded by the NIH's Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative, a U.S. government wide project aimed at revolutionizing our understanding of the brain and brain disorders. The funding will help Addgene create a much needed open-access recombinant antibody/affinity reagent resource for the neuroscience community called NABOR (Neuroscience AntiBody Open Resource).

For this project, Addgene has partnered with James Trimmer, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Physiology and Membrane Biology, University of California Davis School of Medicine. Trimmer, who has created thousands of antibodies/nanobodies for neuroscience research, is an expert at validating these tools. Trimmer will be sharing his tools through this platform and conducting the quality control of the NABOR affinity reagents. While the focus of the NABOR platform will be neuroscience reagents and data, the platform can be expanded for any recombinant antibody tool and therefore will grow to serve the entire scientific community.

"As more affinity reagents are expressed from plasmids, they will be easier to share. We expect that Addgene's open platform for easy exchange of recombinant affinity reagents will drive discoveries for scientists using these tools and enable better engineering of the affinity reagents themselves," says Melina Fan, Ph.D., cofounder and Chief Scientific Officer at Addgene. "We are looking forward to serving the research community in this new capacity."

Recombinant antibodies have many advantages over polyclonal or monoclonal antibodies: more secure archiving, unambiguous molecular definition, and potential for further engineering. Therefore, researchers from around the world are shifting to recombinant DNA-based antibody technologies.

"Affinity reagents are among the most commonly used reagents in neuroscience research today, but there is a critical unmet need for an open-access, molecularly defined, and well validated collection. I'm thrilled to be working with Addgene to bring this resource to life," says Trimmer. Plasmids in the NABOR collection are already being made available (https://www.addgene.org/antibodies/) and affinity reagents in protein format will be introduced within the next year.

About Addgene

Addgene is a nonprofit plasmid repository whose mission is to accelerate research and discovery by improving access to useful research materials and information. Addgene facilitates the sharing of high-quality scientific materials, research reproducibility, and open science by archiving and distributing DNA-based research reagents and associated data to scientists worldwide.

This project will be supported by a NIH BRAIN Initiative grant (NS119916).

The content of this article is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.