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Pharma Tech Outlook | Tuesday, November 24, 2020
The proportion of therapeutic antibodies produced in transgenics has been progressively increasing. Specialists disagree on the reasons that may explain this trend, as both phage display-derived and transgenics-derived antibodies have comparable clinical competence.
FREMONT, CA: The first antibodies were created in mice. Prompted by the innovative development of hybridoma technology, researchers soon found a way to produce adequate amounts of these biomolecules to test their therapeutic efficiency.
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However, with the finding of these antibodies' therapeutic potential came the recognition that molecules from xenogeneic sources produced immunogenic reactions in patients. These reactions became recognized as the Human Anti-Mouse Antibody (HAMA) response.
The sighting of the HAMA response propelled the further growth of methods to lessen the immunogenicity of xenogeneic antibodies (i.e., humanization). Besides, fast-paced technological progress has since permitted the generation of fully human monoclonal antibodies.
Benefits and Constraints of Fully Human Monoclonal Antibody Generation Technologies
Even though most fully human monoclonal antibodies are produced in transgenic mice, recognized approaches to this methodology still pose several limitations. For example, even though transgenics can produce highly specific and affinity-matured antibodies, they still suffer from restraints regarding antigenicity and the host's natural immune response. For this reason, toxic antigens cannot be deployed to immunize mice, and extremely valuable antigen or targets may not elicit a suitable immune response in these hosts.
On the converse, phage display tools have great potential for parallelization, scalability, and miniaturization. Nevertheless, these approaches do not preserve the natural pairing data between heavy and light chains, often ensuing in unnatural antibody pairing and leading to concentrated affinity. Besides, most antibodies generated by phage display might need to undergo further in vitro affinity maturation procedures naturally achieved in immunized transgenic mice.
The proportion of therapeutic antibodies produced in transgenics has been progressively increasing. Specialists disagree on the reasons that may explain this trend, as both phage display-derived and transgenics-derived antibodies have comparable clinical competence.
Independent from the popularity of every approach, both technologies still have substantial room for development. For example, transgenics will benefit from the imminent transition from the low-yield hybridoma method to the high-yield and high-throughput B cell cloning methodology.
Besides, antibody display will likely concentrate on yeast and mammalian display systems to overcome the problems in expressing antibodies in bacterial systems. Furthermore, the technology should also become more competent by coupling the traditional display systems with Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting (FACS) sorting analysis and next-generation sequencing.
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