Overexpression, Effective Renaturation, and Bioactivity of Novel Single‐Chain Antibodies Against TNF‐α

Abstract Neutralization of tumor necrosis factor‐α (TNF‐α) has become an effective therapeutic strategy for TNF‐related autoimmune diseases. Due to the limitations of the large molecular inhibitors in the therapy, development of novel TNF‐α inhibitors is very attractive and useful. In this study, based on the previously designed domain antibody, two novel human anti‐TNF single‐chain antibodies were constructed using modular consensus frameworks of human antibody as scaffold to display the antagonistic peptides. A variety of expression plasmids were used to determine the optimal expression system. The single‐chain antibodies were always overexpressed in E.coli BL21(DE3) host as inclusion bodies. Under the optimized refolding conditions, the inclusion bodies were renatured successfully and the refolded single‐chain antibodies could bind with TNF‐α and block TNF‐induced cytotoxicity on L929 cells. The bioactivity of the single‐chain antibodies was significantly increased over the domain antibody.