The identification of lead antibody candidates is one of the most resource-intensive phases of biotherapeutic development. As AI-enabled design tools and high-throughput library screening approaches generate increasingly large numbers of candidate variants, the bottlenecks in expression, purification, and biophysical characterization have become more visible — and more consequential. A new webinar from Bio-Techne brings together three experts to address these bottlenecks head-on, presenting an integrated workflow approach that spans from high-throughput recombinant antibody production through stable cell line development to early biophysical characterization.
About the Webinar
Title: Accelerating Lead Identification through Integrated Antibody Development and Characterization Workflows
Date: May 20, 2026
Broadcast 1: 9:00 AM ET / 2:00 PM CET
Broadcast 2: 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET
Format: Virtual — Free registration required
The Lead Identification Challenge in Modern Antibody Discovery
Recombinant antibodies occupy a central position in biological research, diagnostics, and therapeutic development. Their ability to be engineered for specific functions — isotype switching, affinity maturation, effector function modification — makes them uniquely versatile tools. And with AI-enabled antibody generation and library screening platforms now capable of producing thousands of novel variants from a single campaign, the scientific opportunity has never been greater.
But the analytical infrastructure required to evaluate those thousands of candidates has not scaled at the same pace as the tools that generate them. Most downstream characterization workflows were designed for the serial evaluation of a small number of candidates — not the parallel screening of hundreds. When production throughput, cell line engineering, and biophysical analysis each become bottlenecks, the speed advantage conferred by AI-enabled design is progressively eroded.
This webinar addresses that disconnect by presenting three workflows that, taken together, enable a more integrated, higher-throughput approach to antibody lead identification — from first expression through early developability assessment.
Part One: High-Throughput Recombinant Antibody Production
Presenter: Matt Heidtman, PhD — Manager, R&D Scale & Purification, Bio-Techne
The first challenge in any large-scale antibody screening campaign is production: generating enough of each candidate in sufficient quantity and purity to support downstream analysis. In standard practice, this is accomplished through transient expression in mammalian cell systems followed by affinity purification — a process that works well for a handful of candidates but becomes a serious logistical burden when applied to screening campaigns involving dozens to hundreds of variants.
Dr. Heidtman presents a workflow designed to express and purify approximately 100 recombinant antibodies in a single run. The presentation addresses the practical challenges this scale introduces: how to manage parallel transient transfections without sacrificing consistency, how to configure purification to maintain throughput without compromising yield or purity, and how to design the workflow so that its outputs are directly compatible with downstream analytical methods.
The relevance of this approach is particularly acute in the context of AI-enabled antibody generation. When a screening algorithm generates hundreds of candidate sequences, the ability to rapidly produce and purify each one in sufficient quantity for characterization directly determines how quickly the campaign can advance from computational output to validated lead. Workflows optimized for individual candidates create an artificial ceiling on the practical throughput of the discovery program.
Part Two: Stable Cell Line Development with the TcBuster System
Presenter: Jessica Fiege, PhD — Supervisor, Customer Applications, Bio-Techne
Once a candidate antibody has been selected from initial screening, the transition to stable cell line development represents a critical and often time-consuming step on the path to therapeutic production. Stable cell lines enable the consistent, high-yield production required for extended characterization, preclinical studies, and eventually clinical manufacturing.
The conventional approach to stable cell line generation relies on random integration of the expression construct into the host cell genome — typically CHO cells — followed by selection, single-cell cloning, expansion, and screening across hundreds of clones to identify those producing antibody at commercially viable titers. This process is inherently inefficient: because integration is random, many clones will integrate in genomic contexts that yield poor expression, and the number of clones that must be screened to find high-performing ones is correspondingly large. The time and labor investment is substantial.
Dr. Fiege presents an alternative approach using the TcBuster system — a DNA transposon-based cell editing platform that enables stable gene transfer into virtually any cell type. Unlike random integration, TcBuster uses a transposase enzyme to mediate targeted insertion, generating a higher proportion of productive integration events and therefore a higher fraction of clones with strong expression characteristics.
The data shared in this session demonstrates a 5-fold higher antibody titer from TcBuster-generated cell lines compared to the random integration pool — a dramatic difference that translates directly into fewer clones requiring screening, faster identification of optimal cell lines, and shorter overall timelines from candidate selection to production-ready cell line. For antibody programs operating under competitive timelines or resource constraints, this efficiency gain has meaningful strategic implications.
Part Three: Early Biophysical Characterization with the Maurice System
Presenter: Srinivasa Rao, PhD — Staff Scientist, Applications Science, Bio-Techne
Regardless of how efficiently an antibody candidate is produced or how well its cell line performs, its ultimate value as a therapeutic depends on its biophysical properties — its size, purity, charge heterogeneity, and overall developability profile. Early identification of candidates with unfavorable biophysical characteristics — aggregation propensity, charge variants indicative of instability, impurity profiles that will complicate downstream purification — prevents the costly mistake of advancing molecules that will fail in later-stage development.
Traditional biophysical characterization methods such as SDS-PAGE for size and purity analysis and ion exchange chromatography (IEX) for charge heterogeneity profiling are well-established but slow. Both require significant hands-on time, may demand additional sample processing steps, and are difficult to run in the parallel, high-throughput format that large-scale screening campaigns require.
Dr. Rao presents two analytical methods implemented on the Maurice System — a capillary electrophoresis platform — that address both speed and information quality simultaneously.
CE-SDS for Size and Purity
Capillary electrophoresis with SDS (CE-SDS) separates proteins by size under denaturing conditions, enabling rapid determination of whether a sample contains intact antibody at the expected molecular weight and what proportion of the material represents product-related impurities or fragments. Compared to conventional SDS-PAGE, CE-SDS is faster, requires less sample, delivers quantitative rather than semi-quantitative results, and generates data in a format that integrates directly into digital workflows without manual gel imaging and densitometry.
For high-throughput screening applications, the ability to run CE-SDS at scale without sample preparation bottlenecks represents a practical improvement over gel-based methods — particularly when dozens to hundreds of unpurified or semi-purified samples need to be assessed before investing in full purification.
icIEF for Charge Heterogeneity
Imaged capillary isoelectric focusing (icIEF) characterizes the charge heterogeneity of antibody preparations by separating variants according to their isoelectric point. Charge variants can arise from post-translational modifications including deamidation, glycosylation differences, and C-terminal lysine processing — and their presence and relative abundance are considered critical quality attributes (CQAs) for biotherapeutic antibodies.
Compared to conventional ion exchange chromatography, icIEF provides higher resolution charge heterogeneity data in a fraction of the time, without requiring column equilibration, gradient development, or extensive method optimization. The data generated directly informs decisions about which candidates carry the charge variant profiles associated with favorable stability and manufacturability — and which should be deprioritized before resources are invested in further development.
The Integrated Workflow: From Expression to Developability
What makes this webinar particularly valuable is not any individual component of the workflow, but the way the three components connect. Producing recombinant antibodies at scale means nothing if the analytical methods downstream cannot process candidates at the same throughput. Rapid biophysical screening means nothing if the samples reaching analysis are inconsistent in quality due to variable production methods.
The workflow presented across these three presentations is designed to function as an integrated system: high-throughput expression and purification generates consistent input material for analysis; TcBuster cell line development accelerates the transition from selected candidate to production platform; and CE-SDS and icIEF on the Maurice System provide the critical quality attribute data needed to rank candidates by developability before committing to further investment.
Together, they represent a practical approach to the lead identification bottleneck — one that does not require abandoning existing discovery platforms or restructuring entire development workflows, but rather upgrading specific stages to match the throughput demands of modern antibody programs.
Speakers
- Jessica Fiege, PhD — Supervisor, Customer Applications, Bio-Techne. Expert in cell line development and high-throughput expression systems for recombinant protein and antibody production.
- Matt Heidtman, PhD — Manager, R&D Scale & Purification, Bio-Techne. Specialist in scalable antibody expression and purification workflows optimized for screening applications.
- Srinivasa Rao, PhD — Staff Scientist, Applications Science, Bio-Techne. Expert in capillary electrophoresis-based biophysical characterization methods including CE-SDS and icIEF.
- Moderator — Peter Johnson — Manager, Field Applications Science, Bio-Techne.
Who Should Attend
This webinar is most relevant for researchers and development scientists working in:
- Antibody discovery and lead optimization, particularly in AI-enabled or high-throughput screening programs
- Cell line development and upstream bioprocess, where TcBuster or alternative stable integration platforms are being evaluated
- Analytical development and quality control, where faster biophysical characterization methods are needed to match screening throughput
- Biotherapeutic development more broadly, including teams working on bispecifics, antibody-drug conjugates, or Fc-engineering programs where developability profiling is an early-stage requirement
Attendees will leave with a concrete understanding of three distinct but complementary workflow improvements, each of which can be implemented independently or as part of the integrated pipeline presented across the session.