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.

Hybridoma technologies: long live the clone One of the most important advances in modern medicine was the advent of technologies designed to generate monoclonal antibodies in 1975, when Köhler and Milstein developed a system to immortalize individual rodent B cells by fusing them to myeloma cancer cells, producing a B cell hybridoma [4] . This achievement would later earn them the Nobel Prize in medicine. In essence, this technology produces an immortal monoclonal antibody factory that retains B cell specificity and secretory abilities. In this way, the hybridoma cell lines can be grown indefinitely, supplying investigators an endless source of monoclonal antibodies. Examples of human B cell fusions were demonstrated some 35 years ago [5] and were used to generate antigen-specific cells a few years later [6] . However, until recently, hybridomas were only efficiently generated from mice and rat cells because of limitations in the techniques for human B cell fusion, including impossibly low fusion efficiencies and instability of the resulting cell lines.