Reproducibility of biomedical research is in a crisis, a phenomenon affecting society as a whole, and poor reagent antibodies are a big part of this. As mentioned in the introduction, the situation with traditional monoclonal antibody detection reagents is not sustainable, as enormous amounts of public and private money are wasted on ill-characterized, non-renewable and poorly performing reagents. Moreover, the downstream costs of research, which cannot be reproduced based on such antibody data, has not even been taken into account. While recombinant reagents (with a defined sequence) have solved the first problem of molecular definition, they have not addressed the problem of the tedious individual generation of each reagent by individual panning experiments.
The PRe-ART vision is that mAbs for many applications in biological research will be replaced over the course of a decade by these designer molecules, with the potential to completely disrupt the industry selling low-quality commercial animal-derived reagent antibodies, and thus create a major new technology for biological research.
Thus, PRe-ART will ultimately contribute not only to the health and well-being of the EU citizen through improved diagnostic capability, but also to the economy of the EU through the development of myriad detection products, enabled by this foundational platform technology. The interdisciplinary PRe-ART project will achieve this goal by bringing together three leading labs from different fields, two of which are lead by women PIs, whose joint efforts will achieve this breakthrough S&T target. The PRe-ART project thus closely addresses all specific challenges of the call.
