Antibody Engineering for Pursuing a Healthier Future

Saeed, Abdullah F. U. H.; Wang, Rongzhi; Ling, Sumei; Wang, Shihua

In the 1890s, von Behring and Kitasato worked on tetanus antitoxin that lead to the development of a new discipline, immunology. They described antibodies for the first time and discovered that inactive toxins can elicit a protective immune response against active toxins in animals (Kantha, 1991) . The transfusion of serum from these protected animals elicited an immune response in other animals. Therefore, antibodies were originally called "antitoxins." Since then, antibodies have been shown to have a wider repertoire of antigen recognition. Antibodies are widely used in diagnostic tests referred as "immunoassays." These are used to confirm diagnoses and for rapidly growing antibody based technologies (Mukherjee et al., 2012) .