Types of Recombinant Drugs - Biotechnology and Your Health: Pharmaceutical Applications - page 56

produce antibodies, and whether these abilities could be shared
with normal antibody-producing cells from an immunized mouse.
To find out, they used two technologies: cell fusion and cell cloning .
They found that if they immunized a normal mouse with a partic-
ular substance and then took the mouse's antibody-producing cells
and fused them with mouse blood-cancer cells, some of the fused
cells would survive and produce antibody protein—not the anti-
body protein of the tumor cell, but one of the antibody proteins
that the immunized mouse produced. The scientists could clone
the antibody-producing fusions, creating cultures of millions of
identical cells from a single fused pair. The culture medium of the
clones contained many millions of molecules of identical antibody
protein. The antibody-producing cells were called hybridomas and
the antibodies they produced were called monoclonal antibodies ,
because they were the result of genetic instructions from a single
antibody-producing cell (Figure 4.4).
The potential uses of monoclonal antibodies were not lost on
the scientific, medical, or business communities. Soon, the method
was being used to produce monoclonal antibodies for labora-
tory tests and treatments for a wide variety of diseases. In 1984,
Milstein and Kohler were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine.
Stop and Consider
Why was the invention of monoclonal antibodies important? What
does the story of how the process of making monoclonal antibodies
was developed tell you about basic scientific research?
Different Animals and Different Antibodies
There was a problem with using mouse monoclonal antibody pro-
teins to treat some human diseases, however. The human immune
system recognizes the mouse antibody as the foreign protein it is,