High-throughput protein binder discovery by rapid in vivo selection

Abstract

Proteins that selectively bind to a target of interest are foundational components of research pipelines^1,2, diagnostics³, and therapeutics⁴. Current immunization-based^5,6, display- based^7–14, and computational approaches^15–17,18 for discovering binders are laborious and time- consuming – taking months or more, suffer from high false positives – necessitating extensive secondary screening, and have a high failure rate, especially for disordered proteins and other challenging target classes. Here we establish Phage-Assisted Non-Continuous Selection of Protein Binders (PANCS-binders), an in vivo selection platform that links the life cycle of M13 phage to target protein binding though customized proximity-dependent split RNA polymerase biosensors, allowing for complete and comprehensive high-throughput screening of billion-plus member protein variant libraries with high signal-to-noise. We showcase the utility of PANCS- Binders by screening multiple protein libraries each against a panel of 95 separate therapeutically relevant targets, thereby individually assessing over 10¹¹ protein-protein interaction pairs, completed in two days. These selections yielded large, high-quality datasets and hundreds of novel binders, which we showed can be affinity matured or directly used in mammalian cells to inhibit or degrade targets. PANCS-Binders dramatically accelerates and simplifies the binder discovery process, the democratization of which will help unlock new creative potential in proteome-targeting with engineered binder-based biotechnologies.