Team:SDU-Denmark/Tour20
The antibody issue
In 1975 Kohler and Milstein initiated the current era of antibody production by inventing the hybridoma technology.
Reference:
Liu JK1. The history of monoclonal antibody development - Progress, remaining challenges and future innovations. 2014 Sep 11;3(4):113-6.
DOI: 10.1016/j.amsu.2014.09.001.
[PubMed]
As mentioned in the introduction, monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are frequently used for numerous purposes in research and in medical aspects and the demand is continuously growing. The production market is exponentially rising.
For the production mammalian cells are most often used, primarily because of their ability to perform post-translational modifications (PTM). Especially N-glycosylation is an important step that results in avoidance of the human immune system, i.e. minimising immunogenicity, making the antibodies usable in clinical aspects. Even though this ability clearly prompts the use of mammalian cells some drawbacks is often disregarded. Foremost requirements for a system capable of making mAbs are high growth rate and high production yield. And that is exactly why we thought of Escherichia Coli as an alternative.