Human combinatorial antibody libraries to hepatitis B surface antigen.

Human antibody Fab fragments that bind to hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) were generated by using a recombinant phage surface-display expression system. Characterization of HBsAg-specific Fab fragments isolated from two vaccinated individuals reveals diversity in specificity of antigen binding and in the sequences of the complementarity-determining region. The sequence results show examples of human light-chain promiscuity that result in fine specificity changes and a strong relationship to a human germ-line gene. This application illustrates further that this technique is a powerful tool to isolate distinct human antibodies against immunogenic viral targets. IMAGES: