Monoclonal Antibody Technology - The Basics

Title: Monoclonal Antibody Technology - The Basics

Substances foreign to the body, such as disease-causing bacteria and viruses and other infectious agents, known as antigens, are recognized by the body's immune system as invaders. Our natural defenses against these infectious agents are antibodies, proteins that seek out the antigens and help destroy them.

Antibodies have two very useful characteristics. First, they are extremely specific; that is, each antibody binds to and attacks one particular antigen. Second, some antibodies, once activated by the occurrence of a disease, continue to confer resistance against that disease; classic examples are the antibodies to the childhood diseases chickenpox and measles.

The second characteristic of antibodies makes it possible to develop vaccines. A vaccine is a preparation of killed or weakened bacteria or viruses that, when introduced into the body, stimulates the production of antibodies against the antigens it contains.

It is the first trait of antibodies, their specificity, that makes monoclonal antibody technology so valuable. Not only can antibodies be used therapeutically, to protect against disease; they can also help to diagnose a wide variety of illnesses, and can detect the presence of drugs, viral and bacterial products, and other unusual or abnormal substances in the blood.

Given such a diversity of uses for these disease-fighting substances, their production in pure quantities has long been the focus of scientific investigation. The conventional method was to inject a laboratory animal with an antigen and then, after antibodies had been formed, collect those antibodies from the blood serum (antibody-containing blood serum is called antiserum). There are two problems with this method: It yields antiserum that contains undesired substances, and it provides a very small amount of usable antibody.

Monoclonal antibody technology allows us to produce large amounts of pure antibodies in the following way: We can obtain cells that produce antibodies naturally; we also have available a class of cells that can grow continually in cell culture. If we form a hybrid that combines the characteristic of "immortality" with the ability to produce the desired substance, we would have, in effect, a factory to produce antibodies that worked around the clock.

In monoclonal antibody technology, tumor cells that can replicate endlessly are fused with mammalian cells that produce an antibody. The result of this cell fusion is a "hybridoma," which will continually produce antibodies. These antibodies are called monoclonal because they come from only one type of cell, the hybridoma cell; antibodies produced by conventional methods, on the other hand, are derived from preparations containing many kinds of cells, and hence are called polyclonal. An example of how monoclonal antibodies are derived is described below.

A myeloma is a tumor of the bone marrow that can be adapted to grow permanently in cell culture. When myeloma cells were fused with antibody-producing mammalian spleen cells, it was found that the resulting hybrid cells, or hybridomas, produced large amounts of monoclonal antibody. This product of cell fusion combined the desired qualities of the two different types of cells: the ability to grow continually, and the ability to produce large amounts of pure antibody.

Because selected hybrid cells produce only one specific antibody, they are more pure than the polyclonal antibodies produced by conventional techniques. They are potentially more effective than conventional drugs in fighting disease, since drugs attack not only the foreign substance but the body's own cells as well, sometimes producing undesirable side effects such as nausea and allergic reactions. Monoclonal antibodies attack the target molecule and only the target molecule, with no or greatly diminished side effects.

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