1 INTRODUCTION

Following polyclonal and full-length monoclonal antibodies as well as genetically engineered antibody fragments (Shahidian et al., 2020 ), antibody mimetics have become a major modality in antibody engineering. It serves as a promising solution to offer more efficient antibody-like molecules, which could be considered as the next generation of antibody engineering, this will be discussed in depth in this article.
Antibody mimetics the property of antibody to recognise and/or neutralise a target molecule, and thus can be used for a wide range of immunoassays and therapeutic purposes. They are designed, modified, or refined from their parent structures, constructed basically by protein directed evolution, peptide design, or complementary determining regions (CDR) fusion through framework region (FR) in different sequences (Baloch et al., 2016 ;Van Holsbeeck et al., 2022 ). To date, several types of antibody mimetics have been developed, such as affibodies, anticalins, DARPins, nanofitins, fynomers, avimers, adnectin, peptide aptamer, affimer, affitin, and so forth (Van Holsbeeck et al., 2022 ;Yu et al., 2017 ).