Potential GM-CSF Antagonists Selected from a Peptide Phage Display Library.

Peptide phage display libraries have been successfully applied in areas of mapping antibody epitope, finding ligands for enzymes, receptors, and many other molecules. But it has been demonstrated to be very difficult to select cytokine-binders from peptide phage display libraries probably because cytokine is not so sticky as antibody that there are rare chances of capturing peptide phages during biopanning. A pVIII-based peptide phage display library was panned with the cytokine GM-CSF and some GM-CSF binding clones were selected based on high throughput screening (HTS) method and confirmed by ELISA and micropanning assays. These cytokine-binders may be utilized in affinity chromatography in cytokine downstream processing and even act as potential antagonists of GM-CSF if their affinity are further improved through secondary library strategy.