Expression of Recombinant Antibodies

Frenzel, André; Hust, Michael; Schirrmann, Thomas

For an efficient reduction of production costs, transgenic plants can be used as they represent a highly scalable expression system; cultivation can be easily expanded without a gross increase in costs. In contrast, the generation of transgenic plants remains very complex and difficult. The most important obstacle of transgenic plants is the downstream processing as tons of plant material may have to be processed. However, antibody production in milk or eggs of animals would also be highly scalable and permits easy downstream processing. Several livestock animal species have been developed for the expression of recombinant proteins, but generation of transgenic animals also is very laborious. An interesting approach is the combination of human transgenic animals with hybridoma technology for the development of human antibodies.