ISSN:
0570-0833
Keywords:
Monoclonal antibodies
;
Antibodies
;
Chemistry
;
General Chemistry
Source:
Wiley InterScience Backfile Collection 1832-2000
Topics:
Chemistry and Pharmacology
Notes:
In December of last year the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology was awarded to the natural scientists N. K. Jerne, C. Milstein, and G. Köhler. These three immunologists have contributed fundamentally to our understanding of antibody synthesis by the individual immune cell. They confirmed the rule, established in the sixties, that only one antibody comes from each type of immune cell, thus giving it the status of a dogma. Jerne worked out the basic understanding of the great variety of antibodies, and his Jerne-Plaque-Test (1963) has enabled us to describe and analyze a single antibody-producing immune cell in vitro. Thus, the study of immune cell interaction and the cooperation of lymphocyte subpopulations, which leads to the formation of antibodies, received decisive impulses and important methodological prerequisites. In 1975 Köhler and Milstein succeeded in permanently stabilizing, i.e., immortalizing, the antibody production of an already immunologically specifically primed mortal immune cell by means of cell fusion (hybridization) with an immortal, cancerous immune cell (myeloma cell). The hybrid cell and the hybrid cell clone grown from it in cell culture produced a homogeneous antibody, having the desired constant binding specificity, in a practically unlimited fashion and independently of an animal organism, a monoclonal antibody. This scientific breakthrough was the beginning of a tremendously stimulating new biotechnological development, which very quickly spread to laboratories in diverse fields and which today enables us to take up, and in part even solve, scientific, technical, and medical problems that would otherwise not have been analyzable at present.
Additional Material:
15 Ill.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.198501393
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