Human monoclonal antibodies - A dual advantaged weapon to tackle cancer and viruses

Human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are powerful tools as pharmaceutical agents to tackle cancer and infectious diseases. Antibodies (Abs) are present in blood at the concentration of 10 mg/ml and play a vital role in humoral immunity. Many therapeutic Abs have been reported since early 1980s.Human mAb technology was not available at that time and only the hybridoma technology for making mouse mAbs had been well established. In order to avoid various potential problems associated with use of mouse proteins, two different technologies to make human/mouse chimeric Ab as well as humanized Ab were developed crossing the various hurdles for almost twenty years and mAb based drugs such as rituximab, anti-CD20 Ab, and trastuzumab, anti-HER2 Ab, have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and breast cancer in 1997 and 1998, respectively. These drugs are well recognized and accepted by clinicians for treatment of patients. The clinical outcome of the treatment with mAb has strongly encouraged the researchers to develop much more refined mAbs. In addition to chimeric Ab and humanized Ab, now human mAbs can be produced by two technologies. The first is transgenic micethat produce human Abs and the second is human Ab libraries using phage-display system.