Stacey Willard | VP Product
Nuclera

Festival of Biologics Day 1 @ 14:30

Testing Engineered Antibodies at Scale: Cell-Free Screening of AI Designed Panels

Antibody engineering campaigns, whether affinity maturation, humanisation, or computational and de novo design, generate large panels of variant molecules, but only a minority typically bind as intended. Confirming which designs work still depends on mammalian expression, purification and biosensor analysis, a 4–8+ week cycle that spends high-cost biology on variants before their binding is known and slows every design–test iteration.

We present a cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) workflow that tests engineered antibody panels rapidly, at scale, and low cost. Full-length IgG variants are expressed in a 96-plex format with binary expression/binding classification plus SPR kinetics.

We will showcase two designed AI-generated libraries to illustrate the approach. An anti-PD-1 panel reached 98% expression, identified 66% as non-binders, and achieved 91% concordance with CHO BLI at 3% CV. An anti-IL-6 panel targeting a historically challenging epitope reached 100% expression, identified 83% non-binders, and achieved 94% concordance with CHO SPR.

By resolving which designs express and bind before mammalian scale-up, CFPS lets engineering teams iterate faster and commit resources only to validated molecules — accelerating the design–test cycle at the heart of antibody engineering.

Stacey Willard, VP Product, Nuclera

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Stacey Willard / Testing Engineered Antibodies at Scale: Cell-Free Screening of AI Designed Panels

Stacey Willard, VP Product,
Nuclera

Stacey Willard is Vice President of Marketing and Product Management at Nuclera, where she leads product strategy and commercialization for Nuclera’s protein access technologies and service offerings. She brings deep scientific expertise in life science tools, protein biology workflows, and...

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