Types of Recombinant Drugs - Biotechnology and Your Health: Pharmaceutical Applications - page 55

THE PRODUCTION OF ANTIBODIES
Although the serum of animals immunized with small amounts
of toxins has been used for many years to help people recover
from diphtheria or to provide protection against snake or scor-
pion venom, there have been other situations where a specific
antibody was needed in a concentrated form. Unfortunately, there
were limits to what animal antibodies could do. First, the animal
serum preparations, even with repeated injections, were mixtures
of antibodies—not collections of many of the same antibody.
That is just the way the immune system works in animals, includ-
ing humans. In addition, there was always the danger of taking
the serum from a diseased animal; remember the case of Jim, the
horse with tetanus!
As with penicillin and insulin, serendipity rewarded prepared
minds. Georges Kohler, a Swiss postdoctoral fellow working at
Cambridge University in England, with Argentine-born Professor
Cesar Milstein, wanted to understand how the production of
antibody proteins was controlled within immune system cells. In
the late 1950s, scientists had discovered that any single antibody-
producing cell made only one form of an antibody protein, and
that some blood cancers produced large amounts of a single type
of antibody protein. In fact, physicians could diagnose this type of
blood-cell cancer by showing that the serum of the patients was
not filled with the usual mixture of antibody proteins, but instead
had one predominant antibody protein.
The science of growing blood-cell cancers had advanced to the
point that cultures of such cancers from mice or humans could be
easily grown in the lab. Normal antibody-producing cells from
mice that had been immunized to produce antibodies to a specific
protein did not survive in the laboratory, but antibody-producing
cancer cells grew just fine, emitting lots of antibody protein. Kohler
and Milstein wanted to know what changes allowed the antibody-
producing cancer cell to survive and grow in the laboratory and