Congratulation to Leonie Kolmar!
© 2021 EPFL LBMM
On June 2nd, 2021, Leonie Kolmar successfully passed her candidacy exam. This was a very promising first step in her PhD entiteled "Establishing a high-throughput antibody screening platform using droplet microfluidics".
The aim of Leonie Kolmar’s PhD thesis is to develop two different high-throughput antibody screening techniques that address two mayor drawbacks of current antibody screening approaches. The first project addresses the problem, that current screening methods are still missing a system allowing to screen diverse target and protein libraries against each other. Thus, the aim of this project will be to develop a screening platform which screens two diverse phage libraries against each other using droplet-based microfluidics.
The aim of the second project will be to develop a high-throughput target-based functional antibody screening by using target cell transcriptomics as readout. This technology would enable to study the transcriptomic effects of single antibody-secreting cells on single target cells of interest, in order to identify functional antibodies of interest.
lf successful, these two new antibody screening techniques could be used to identify thousands of possible hits in only one screen which would simplify and fasten the screening for new functional antibodies against novel and so far unknown targets.