A new selection campaign starts

A program is starting work on a CD20-targeting antibody. The campaign will run phage panning against a recombinant CD20 construct already in the bioregistry, using your team's standard naive scFv library as input.

Campaign scoping is the differentiator at this stage. Project, target, display format, and input source are first-class fields on the campaign record, and the target picker is filtered to the project's scope, so the campaign can't drift from the work it's supporting. Phage, yeast, or any other formats your team has configured register the same way. The input can be a library, a prior campaign's output for a continuation, or a mix, and a campaign branched from a prior one keeps the lineage back to its parent, so the relationship between campaigns is recoverable later.

You walk the campaign through its rounds

Panning rounds happen at the bench. In Affinity, they accumulate as a campaign history on a single page.

The campaign's page is the working surface for the whole campaign, with two renderings of the same data: a diagram that draws the campaign as a connected series of rounds, antigens, libraries, and inputs; and a table with the round-by-round details. Each round carries its positive antigens, negative antigens, input samples, and any conditions worth flagging in a description. Round-level structure mirrors how panning campaigns are planned and run, not a flattened "experiment" abstraction.

The recovery plot is the campaign's diagnostic. Affinity computes percent recovery across the rounds based on recorded titer and renders it live, so the climbing curve of a successfully enriching campaign, or the stall or drop of one that's hit a wall, is visible as a round is recorded.

The campaign's outputs surface on the same page. Clones whose sample lineage traces back to this campaign across however many rounds they appear in are displayed, along with the screening plates or tubes in which those clones are found. Diagram, rounds, recovery, output clones, output plates, output tubes — the entire campaign is one page, not a set of disconnected records to reassemble.

From plate to clone

Round four is done. The plate-level binding data is in, and the work now is identifying which wells are the real binders and turning them into clone records ready to advance.

The plates came into Affinity the way the lab produced them. A phage panning output drops in from the campaign with its lineage already attached and every aliquot tied back to the round it came from. A hybridoma fusion comes in as a registered plate set; a single-B-cell sort the same way; an arbitrary protein screen the same way. The screening plate is now an object the rest of the work hangs off, and the trail back to the source is always there.

Identifying the hits and consolidating them happens in one operation, not two. The scientist selects the round's screening plates, opens and opens a built-in report builder that pulls the assay data attached to each well alongside the plate layout. Strong CD20 binders sort to the top, weak ones in the middle, and background at the bottom, ready to apply thresholds, sort by measurement, or visually inspect via scatterplot. From the same view, the scientist stamps the chosen wells onto a fresh plate (or cherry-picks specific ones when the layout calls for it). The rearray gets recorded as a single operation: source plates in, resulting plates out, and the sample set captured, so the answer to which clones came from which wells of which round is always queryable, not reconstructed later from a notebook.

Then the picks get sequenced, and this is where Affinity's built-in sequence analysis comes in. Configured pipelines take the reads and produce paired heavy and light variable domains, framework regions, and CDR annotations for each clone, automatically. No separate bioinformatics tool to keep in sync. No FASTA round-trip. No manual annotation pass. The resulting clone records are built around the biological object the scientist actually cares about: paired domains with their framework and CDR breakdown, connected to the target the clone was raised against, with a link back to the originating campaign.

How Discovery connects to the rest of Affinity

• Planning supplies the project and target structure a campaign is scoped to. Each campaign is tied to a project and one of its targets from the start, and the clones and panel it produces stay within that project.

• Bioregistry is where the campaign's output lands. Clones produced here are the input to the Antibodies page's "Register from Clones" path; the variable domains called during clone identification populate the antibody's paired-chain detail on registration.

• Molecular Biology picks up where clone selection chooses the constructs to clone into expression vectors. The same clones registered here carry forward into vector construction.

• Protein Production expresses the candidates in the panel that comes out of the campaign; the proteins that come back carry their expression and characterization results, tied to the same candidates.

• Analysis rings the sequence analysis that calls paired variable domains, framework, and CDRs on the campaign's clones, and the screening-data analysis used to pick the best binders out of a round.

• Inventory holds the screening plates as physical containers, the clone tubes as physical samples, and the rearrayed plates as the next round of physical work.

The campaign's output isn't manually handed off. Once a clone is identified, the rest of the platform knows about it.

Why choose Affinity for discovery

• Native support for every major discovery workflow. Display-platform campaigns (phage, yeast, and other formats), hybridoma screening, and single-B-cell sorting. Each runs as a first-class workflow with the operations the platform actually needs, not as a variation of a generic screening abstraction.

• The campaign artifacts scientists actually use. Round diagrams, recovery plots, rearray operations, clone plates, and paired variable domain calling are built in, not bolted on.

• One platform from immunization to panel. The immunization study, the screening campaign, the clone identification, and the panel ready for expression all live in the same system. Lineage is preserved across the whole loop.

• Transparent pricing. $175 per user per month, every module included.

• Founded in 2011, focused exclusively on biologics R&D — more than a decade of building the workflows above for the scientists who actually run them.