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 technologies covered thus far aimed at producing carbon copies of human antibodies in vitro in order to examine an in vivo response. However, one great stride in monoclonal antibody technology came from McCafferty and colleagues, who developed technology to randomly reassemble human antibody genes in vitro, producing novel combinations of antibodies that may never appear in the human body. Seeking to increase the speed of the screening process for identifying antigen-specific antibodies, McCafferty and colleagues adapted a method known as phage display for antibody genes [19] . This method uses bacteriophage particles containing a random combination of heavy-and lightchain-encoding genes. These random heavy and light chain pairs are then expressed on the surface of the capsid. Affinity chromatography is then used to assay for binding to antigens of interest, allowing for relatively quick identification and selection of heavy and light chain pairs that bind the antigen of interest with reasonable affinity.