Harnessing the immune system's arsenal: producing human monoclonal antibodies for therapeutics and investigating immune responses

Sullivan, Meghan; Kaur, Kaval; Pauli, Noel; Wilson, Patrick C.

The entire procedure from whole blood to purified monoclonal antibodies can take as little as 14 days and to date is the most efficient method available to generate numerous human monoclonal antibodies that bind a particular target. The drawback to this approach is that it is best used on fresh blood collected over a short time span during an active immune response in which antibody-secreting cells are proliferating and present in the blood. Our lab recently used this approach to make the surprising observation that people infected with the highly unique 2009 pandemic influenza strain preferentially induced antibodies to epitopes conserved between this novel strain and highly divergent strains to which the patients had been previously exposed [28] . Critically, as demonstrated recently in mice [29, 30] , the targeted regions of the influenza proteins were conserved because they were vital for viral function and virulence; thus, the antibodies elicited against the conserved regions were both neutralizing and broadly protective. These promising data demonstrate that the eradication of influenza as a human disease through a one-shot pan-influenza vaccine is indeed feasible by using the right influenza strain for immunization.