A Review on: Antibody Engineering for Development of Therapeutic Antibodies

Abstract

The development of hybridoma technology in 1975 by the two scientists, Kohler and Milstein, has opened a new era for production of specific antibodies in diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases both in animals and humans. Since then, many scientists have worked much in the field of antibody cloning and fragmentation technique to produce a very specific antibody called monoclonal antidody which is very usefull in the disease combating activity. An antibody is a large Y-shaped glycoprotein produced by B-cells. Therapeutic antibodies represent one of the fastest growing areas of the pharmaceutical industry. Antibodies have been engineered by a variety of methods to suit a particular therapeutic use. Hybridomas are cells that have been engineered to produce a desired antibody in large amounts, to produce monoclonal antibodies. Mouse antibodies have been reengineered in vitro to replace framework amino acid residues with corresponding human sequences through antibody fragment engineering. For use of antibodies as therapeutics, a diversity of engineered antibody forms have been created to improve their efficacy, including enhancing effector functions of full-length antibodies, delivering toxins to kill cells or cytokines in order to stimulate immune system, bispecific antibodies to target multiple receptors, and intrabodies to interfere and inhibit cellular processes inside cells in a number of ways. One technology that has been explored to generate low immunogenicity of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) for in vitro therapy involves the use of transgenic animals and plants expressing repertories of the target antibody gene sequences. This technology has now been exploited by over a dozen different pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies toward developing new therapy mAbs. Now a days, scientists are using transgenic animals and plants to produce specific antibodies (monoclonal antibodies) and are showing an innovative promise in future to solve many disease cost problems both in animal and human. However, the use and industrial production of monoclonal antibodies through the application of antibody engineering is still less than the expected value, mostly in developing country's including Ethiopia.