a Overview of the phage display process, illustrating key molecules involved at each step (1-panning, 2-counter panning, 3-phage selection, 4-polyclonal ELISA, 5-clone sequencing and monoclonal ELISA, 6-cloning, 7-recombinant production of positive candidates, 8-resulting antibody fragments) of the panning strategies performed on naive LiAb-SFMAXTM (scFv) and synthetic HuCAL (Fab) (gray boxes) or ALTHEA Gold semi-synthetic (scFv) library (purple boxes). b Sensograms depicting the interaction of resulting recombinant antibody fragments (F3 scFv2, F4 scFv2, F8 scFv2, F11 scFv2, C9 scFv2, B1 Fab2, and B3 scFv2) to ofCS, purified from human placenta and immobilized on a quartz crystal microbalance biosensor chip. Red curves correspond to experimental points and rate constants (association rate kon, dissociation rate koff, binding constant KD) were determined using a 1:2 fitting model with fitted curves in black. c Flow cytometry binding of V5-tagged-scFv2 (F4, F11, B3, C9, F8, and F3) and FLAG-tagged-Fab2 (B1) to cancer cell lines (hematological leukemic NALM-6 (top), epithelial colorectal Colo205 (middle) and mesenchymal glioblastoma U2OS (bottom)). The binding was measured as relative GeoMFI probed with FITC-labeled secondary antibodies without (colored) or with (gray) chABC treatment, with number of data point (n) indicated for each group. d C9 scFv2 binding to a larger panel of human cancer cell lines (hematological (red), epithelial (blue), and mesenchymal (green)) and to healthy purified white blood cells (purple), at 150 nM concentration, compared to the secondary antibody control (gray). e Immunofluorescence staining of A549 lung cancer cells spiked into healthy donor blood with PE-labeled scFv2 (F4, F8) or Fab2 (B1) (yellow), anti-CD45-Alexa647 (pink) and DAPI (blue). Top panel is a merged image of the three individuals shown below. These scans are representative of an image dimension of 2286 tiles and 41.06 mm × 14.03 mm per image (B1/F4) or 130 tiles and 5.12 mm × 2.91 mm (F8). Source data are provided as a Source data file.