Development and validation of a flow cytometric method to evaluate phagocytosis of pHrodo™ BioParticles® by granulocytes in multiple species.

Phagocytosis plays a pivotal and essential role in host immune defense, both as a focal constituent of the innate immune response and a bridging element linking innate and adaptive immunity. Phagocytosis has been demonstrated to be critical in development, tissue remodeling, wound healing and resolution of inflammation through clearance of foreign organisms, apoptotic cells and the production of anti-inflammatory mediators. During pre-clinical investigations, therapeutic drug candidates may alter host resistance to infectious agents by modulating the immune system.

Affinity enhancement of an in vivo matured therapeutic antibody using structure-based computational design.

Improving the affinity of a high-affinity protein-protein interaction is a challenging problem that has practical applications in the development of therapeutic biomolecules. We used a combination of structure-based computational methods to optimize the binding affinity of an antibody fragment to the I-domain of the integrin VLA1. Despite the already high affinity of the antibody (Kd approximately 7 nM) and the moderate resolution (2.

Comparative analyses of a small molecule/enzyme interaction by multiple users of Biacore technology.

To gauge the experimental variability associated with Biacore analysis, 36 different investigators analyzed a small molecule/enzyme interaction under similar conditions. Acetazolamide (222 g/mol) binding to carbonic anhydrase II (CAII; 30000 Da) was chosen as a model system. Both reagents were stable and their interaction posed a challenge to measure because of the low molecular weight of the analyte and the fast association rate constant.

Analysis of the role of the interleukin-2 receptor gamma chain in ligand binding.

Interleukin-2 is the primary T cell growth factor secreted by activated T cells. IL-2 is an alpha-helical cytokine that binds to a multisubunit receptor expressed on the surface of a variety of cell types. IL-2Ralpha, IL-2Rbeta, and IL-2Rgammac receptor subunits expressed on the surface of cells may aggregate to form distinct binding sites of differing affinities.

Increased endosomal sorting of ligand to recycling enhances potency of an interleukin-2 analog.

An interleukin-2 (IL-2) variant containing adjacent point mutations (L18M/L19S, termed 2D1) displaying binding affinity to the heterotrimeric IL-2 receptor similar to that of wild-type IL-2 (WT) had been previously found to surprisingly exhibit increased bioactivity in a peripheral blood lymphocyte proliferation assay. In order to provide an explanatory mechanism for this unexpected potency enhancement, we hypothesize that altered endocytic trafficking of the 2D1 variant might be responsible by increasing the number of ligand-receptor complexes. We demonstrate here that the internalization kinetics of 2D1 via the high affinity IL-2 receptor are equivalent to those of WT but that a significantly increased fraction of internalized 2D1 is sorted to recycling instead of to lysosomal degradation.