The possibility of producing human recombinant antibodies by the phage display libraries technology has opened up new perspectives in the fields of immunological research and therapeutic applications. Despite the interest for a potential use of this technology in the HLA field, no information is so far available about selection and screening of libraries with HLA antigens. In this study we report our first experience with expression and characterization of human single-chain antibody fragments (scFvs) against HLA-DR epitopes selected from a synthetic phage library.