Antibody development has dramatically changed the pharmaceutical world, allowing for the creation of life-saving drugs and improvements to healthcare that would otherwise be impossible. An industry valued at approximately 115.2 billion US dollars in 2018 by the Journal of Biomedical Science, therapeutic antibody treatments are able to target a wide variety of medical conditions, ranging from cancer to autoimmune diseases as well as infectious illnesses. Due to the unique benefits of antibiotic-based drugs, eight of the top ten most popular drugs worldwide employed the use of therapeutic antibodies.
There are two methods that most pharmaceutical companies employ in order to produce a certain antibody to treat a medical condition. These are monoclonal antibody production and polyclonal antibody production. While each has its own benefits, monoclonal antibiotic production offers some significant advantages over its polyclonal antibiotic counterpart.
Monoclonal antibiotic production refers to a method of antibiotic development involving clones of a single cell or cell line. This cloned cell is called a hybridoma, constructed by fusing an antibody-producing lymphocyte and a tumor cell together in order to create a cell that can produce a specific type of antibody when an antigen is introduced to the cell. In contrast, polyclonal antibodies are produced by multiple cells and are typically harvested by introducing an animal to an antigen. Here are the top five benefits of monoclonal antibodies.
Hybridomas Don’t Have Natural Lifespans Like Animals Do
One of the most significant advantages of monoclonal antibody development is the fact that hybridomas, the cloned cells that produce the antibodies, don’t require the same care to keep alive that animals do. Using animals to produce antibodies can become costly as animals require basic standards of living space, food, water, and other necessities. Although employing cloned cells is more expensive up front, the lack of necessary maintenance of living animals can help to cut down expenses in the long run.
Additionally, hybridomas are fusions of lymphocytes and myeloma cells. While most cells kill themselves after several generations of division in order to reduce the chance of malicious mutations, myeloma cells, otherwise known as cancer cells, lack the ability to self-destruct, rendering them essentially immortal. That means that you only have to acquire hybridomas once and they will continue to produce the specified antibody, unlike animals that age and die naturally.
Consistency Is Maintained Between Batches
Another significant benefit of monoclonal antibodies is that the quality and properties of the antibodies remain consistent through all production batches since the same cloned cell is used to produce all antibodies. By contrast, using multiple animals to produce antibodies introduces a large number of variables on antibody quality that can affect the reliability of production.
Antibodies On Demand
The hybridomas used during monoclonal antibody development can function as antibody factories once an antigen is introduced to them, allowing antibody developers to create antibodies whenever they are required. While quicker and less expensive in the short run, polyclonal antibodies require multiple animals to be immunized against a single antigen in order to produce sufficient antibodies, and the number of antibodies produced is dependent on an individual animal’s immune system and immune response.
Clones Can Be Sorted To Ensure High Growth
Although hybridomas are difficult and costly to produce — 99% of cells fail to survive the fusion process — the resultant hybridomas may undergo a selection process to accurately determine which cell candidates are most optimized to produce a certain antibody against an antigen. This means that investments in cloned hybridomas can ensure better results later on during the production stage, whereas it is difficult to determine how well any given animal will produce antibodies to a new antigen.
The Antigen Doesn’t Have To Be Pure
Finally, monoclonal antibody development eliminates the necessity to extract and store extremely pure samples of antigen, allowing for less risk of failure in case of antigen contamination and cost savings down the line. In the case of polyclonal antibodies, animals cannot be injected with impure antigens for medical and ethical reasons, so the antigens used during the developmental process need to be as pure as possible.
This also means that multiple control samples need to be utilized during polyclonal antibody development, as the number of possible variables that could compromise a single trial is significantly higher. While monoclonal antibody development offers substantial advantages over its polyclonal counterpart, there are still many reasons why antibody developers may prefer to use polyclonal antibodies rather than monoclonal ones.
Polyclonal antibodies are cheaper to produce upfront, without the cost in both time and money of having to fuse hybridomas. Polyclonal antibody development also allows developers to attempt to generate antibodies in a variety of animals in order to find an optimum response. The advantages and disadvantages of the two antibody production types should be carefully considered before any decision is made to determine which one is right for your applications.
