With higher awareness of animal rights, more and more people in recent years are advocating for animal welfare, such as eliminating experimental animals. For example, non-animal-derived antibodies have thus been developed to replace animal-derived antibodies.

However, this replacement may lead to an enormous waste of hybridomas, the main manufacturers of animal-derived antibodies. Besides, there are still many problems relating to non-animal-derived antibodies.

Therefore, we devised a win-win solution based on optimizing the hybridoma technology to reduce animal use while simultaneously retaining the advantages of animal-derived antibodies.

By combining the enzyme AID and the Tet-on bioswitch, we built a controllable system to induce point mutations on the variable region genes of the antibodies inside the hybridomas to produce different antibodies.

As for the later stage of the hybridoma technology, we also designed a bioreactor to culture cells and collect antibodies more efficiently to simplify the complicated procedure.

Our project aims to develop an animal-free method to acquire diverse animal-derived antibodies. We also have the vision to expand our work to the medical field, such as disease diagnosis and treatment, in the future.