New year! New supplier! Many new products for your research!

At the beginning of this year, we would like to welcome a new supplier to the Biomol family and introduce them here in our blog: Atlas Antibodies.

This company has a very special history, but more about that in a minute.

First, it gets unusually personal. When I first learned about Atlas Antibodies' corporate history, I couldn't help but think back to my days as a scientist in the lab. I'm a biochemist by education, and I did research on lymph nodes for quite a while. This tissue is treated quite step-motherly in the general research community and I often had to refer to information that is close to 100 years old. In order to plan experiments, a scientist needs some data as a basis and so I came across a homepage called "Human Protein Atlas". Here, I found a large amount of data about the occurrence of proteins in the lymph node tissue, which I could use for orientation. What a great support!

Who was behind it? And what does this anecdote have to do with our new supplier Atlas Antibodies?

Find out in the following interview with Dr. Caroline Kampf (photo), a co-founder of the Human Protein Atlas and Chief Scientific Officer at Atlas Antibodies.

Hello Dr. Caroline Kampf. Happy New Year! Atlas Antibodies is located in Stockholm in Sweden. Are there any special new year's traditions in Sweden?

Oh, that is a good question! When I think of New Year, I am thinking of fireworks and lobster and champagne. That’s maybe not so special for Sweden, but that is how we do it. But I ask myself if it´s okay with fireworks nowadays, because of the environment. But that is what we normally do in Sweden and, of course, meet your very best and closest friends. So, it is all very similar to Germany, I think.

Thanks for the opportunity to ask you a few questions! First of all, can you tell us something about yourself and your position at Atlas Antibodies?

I started at Atlas Antibodies in 2016, so it´s more than five years now. But I was working very close with Atlas Antibodies before, being a co-founder of the Human Protein Atlas, which is the heritage of Atlas Antibodies.  The position I have is Chief Scientific Officer, and I enjoy to work with our fantastic products and in a fantastic team. So that is about my position. And about myself: I exercise often and spend a lot of time outdoors. That is very important, especially because we spend so much time at a desk in front of a computer in meetings and so on. So, I love to jog or just take a walk to reflect and think.

Can you tell us a bit about the history of the company? Your story is quite special.

Yes, as I said, it´s been an amazing history of Atlas Antibodies since we founded the Human Protein Atlas in 2003. In an academic project, we decided to produce antibodies to all proteins of the human body! And I think that this was such a cool and bold effort, and I am very proud of it. And then we started the Human Protein Atlas and mapped every protein in the body by producing antibodies in a very standardized way. We also validate the antibodies with regards to in which tissues and in which cells they locate their target proteins. The next step is to proof, that the antibodies really work. We validate them on up to 44 different normal tissues and common cancer types. So, we built a protein factory from A to Z! And we are the original manufacturer, which is very important if you ask me. After a couple of years, we had a lot of antibodies in this academic project. Then people were approaching us and asked if they could get some antibodies, because they are interested in a special protein and nobody else had antibodies for that protein. This was 20 years ago! We decided then to found Atlas Antibodies in 2006. Every year, we map 1000 proteins and make the antibodies available at Atlas Antibodies. For now, we nearly mapped the whole human proteome with the Human Protein Atlas. So, I think this is a really cool history.

This really is an amazing story! When I was still in the lab as a scientist, I was very grateful to have access to this big amount of data. So, thank you very much for that!

(laughs) You are welcome, that’s so good to hear! The aim of the academic project was to map and produce data that is publicly available for the research community. But that is also good for Atlas Antibodies as a company, because it´s a very transparent work because the data is public. The customers can make their own choice for a negative and positive control and plan their analysis.

A big problem with research based on the use of antibodies is a lack of specificity. This leads to many false-positive results, especially with polyclonal antibodies. How do you provide the high specificity of your polyclonal antibodies? 

The antibodies are developed against recombinant human “Protein Epitope Signature Tags”. We call them PrESTs. The PrEST sequences are designed to have the lowest possible identity to other human proteins. They are 50 to 150 amino acids long in our standard process, depending on how big the protein is. Next, we purify the antibody in a three-step process. We affinity-purify the serum with the antigen of the antibody, so we are very sure to have a specific antibody that we sell. You know polyclonal antibodies are batch-to-batch-dependent, so it is very important for us to validate each and every batch for our recommended applications. We want to be very sure that there is no lot-to-lot variation. So, we spend a lot of time on this process.  

What are the possible applications for the customer?

The base is immunochemistry. The antibody has to be approved with IHC to be published on the Human Protein Atlas. We also perform Western Blot und ICC-IF. Over the years, we saw that scientists use our products for ELISA or even Flow Cytometry as well. But we are not approving our antibodies for all these different applications. We focus on the mentioned three. What is also very important, is the fact that our antibodies not only function in humans, but also in other species such as rodents. And that is really important for the research.

Are there any research fields that play a special role for Atlas Antibodies?

Our goal is to have antibodies for every protein in the human body! So, we are not focusing on metabolism or free radical research for example. We have more or less everything. But we map our products on normal and cancer tissue. Basically, everything can be associated with cancer. We are also very strong in neurology, as a lot of my senior scientists are trained in that field. We always start with basic cellular processes and then focus on complex diseases, such as Parkinson or Alzheimer. But we have customers, who work with rare diseases, because Atlas has a niche to rather unknown proteins. That is really useful for people, who are working with rare diseases. 

Your antibodies are used in research worldwide. Are there currently any exciting studies in which your products are being used?

Yes, we have some exciting application possibilities, that we know about. For example, a pharma company is using our products to select patients for clinical trials. They use our antibodies in diagnostic tests to categorize different patient groups. And of course, there are lots of publications with our products. Antibodies are a very basic product. The future is bright for antibodies and proteins.

What are your plans for the future? What goals do you want to achieve with Atlas Antibodies?

(laughs) You can aim for the stars! There is so much potential in this company. We are one of the fastest growing life science companies and we have significant growth every year. Also, we acquired two other companies: HistoCyte Laboratories and evitria in Switzerland. So, we grow our company by building new structures and this will be an exciting journey! We want to grow the team and supply researchers worldwide with high-quality products. And of course, we want to enable them to use these products in all the technologies that are out there, and do exciting research. You know, in the end, we are all patients who may need high-quality diagnostics or treatment. And this was one of the original intentions of the Human Protein Atlas! If we could help to save only one patient, we have succeeded. So, the drive and the motivation are very high in this field and this company.

Thank you very much Dr. Kampf for the exciting interview!