antibodies Review Phage Display Libraries for Antibody Therapeutic Discovery and Development Juan C. Almagro 1,2,* , Martha Pedraza-Escalona 3, Hugo Iván Arrieta 3 and Sonia Mayra Pérez-Tapia 3 1 GlobalBio, Inc., 320, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA 2 UDIBI, ENCB, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Prolongación de Carpio y Plan de Ayala S/N, Colonia Casco de Santo Tomas, Delegación Miguel Hidalgo, Ciudad de Mexico 11340, Mexico 3 CONACyT-UDIBI, ENCB, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Prolongación de Carpio y Plan de Ayala S/N, Colonia Casco de Santo Tomas, Delegación Miguel Hidalgo, Ciudad de Mexico 11340, Mexico * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 24 June 2019; Accepted: 15 August 2019; Published: 23 August 2019 Abstract: Phage display technology has played a key role in the remarkable progress of discovering and optimizing antibodies for diverse applications, particularly antibody-based drugs. This technology was initially developed by George Smith in the mid-1980s and applied by John McCafferty and Gregory Winter to antibody engineering at the beginning of 1990s. Here, we compare nine phage display antibody libraries published in the last decade, which represent the state of the art in the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies using phage display. We first discuss the quality of the libraries and the diverse types of antibody repertoires used as substrates to build the libraries, i.e., naïve, synthetic, and semisynthetic. Second, we review the performance of the libraries in terms of the number of positive clones per panning, hit rate, affinity, and developability of the selected antibodies. Finally, we highlight current opportunities and challenges pertaining to phage display platforms and related display technologies.