The virus SARS-CoV-2 from Wuhan has bought chaos worldwide, infecting over 3.9 million people globally. It is a race against time to develop a vaccine and put a stop to the COVID-19 crisis. This led researchers and industries to work at rocket-speed to develop the vaccine. The simple two-way business, life comes with a price tag. Recently, Israel announced that researchers at the Israel Institute of Biological Research have developed a monoclonal antibody (mAb) with a potential to “neutralize” SARS-CoV-2. Seeing at the growing number of potential vaccines available in the market, with no guarantee if that will work or not. It becomes more confusing when the contents of a little bottle remain unknown. This article intends to outline the journey of a vaccine, from a lab to the human body.
AntibodyAn antibody is a protein-bound to an antigen. An antigen is a foreign substance including toxins, chemicals, bacteria, viruses, or any substance that triggers the production of antibodies. A fact that though our body produces several antibodies to fight infection, not all of them neutralises the virus. These antibodies are like a pack of an army that keeps circulating throughout the body in a search operation to hunt down and tag the antigen (attachment of antibodies to an antigen). Once attached, it renders the virus inactive and prevents from binding to other cells. The immune system recognizes the signal from the antibody and destroys the cells containing the antigen. If the produced antibodies are not enough, the outcome is death.
Polyclonal antibodies Polyclonal antibodies are produced in vivo (live animals) The limitations of polyclonal antibody lies within its non-specificity and heterogeneous nature.
Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs)Antibodies can also be designed and produced in vitro (outside the animal body) to target a specific antigen, and these are known as monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). At present most of the vaccines are based on polyclonal antibodies. Producing monoclonal antibodies is an expensive process and to make one of this, investigators must identify the right target (antigen) to attack. Some researchers are using the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 as an antigen. Monoclonal antibodies are often used to treat cancer patients.
A brief story on mAbsMonoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are the artificially produced protein to target a specific antigen. Earlier, MAbs production was tested using an animal immunized against a pathogen. After which B-lymphocytes were isolated from the animal and cultured in vitro. But This approach involved a lot of downsides and thus unsuccessful. The production of mAbs makes use of hybridoma technology. Hybridoma technology uses the fusion of two different cells into one. The work has first been in 1975, for which George Köhler and Cesar Milstein won Nobel Prize in 1984. They successfully created hybridomas by fusing myeloma cell lines (immortal cancerous cells) with B cells.
How mAbs are produced?Production of monoclonal antibodies involves identifying antigen-specific plasma/plasmablast cells (ASPCs) and fusing these with myeloma cells. ASPCs are the cells which will eventually produce the antibodies specific to an antigen of interest. The main purpose of hybridizing antibody-producing B-cells with myeloma cells are to gain the immortalized character (indefinite multiplication). So that it can be grown later in a huge quantity using some special media and then use these cells as a factory for producing antibodies. Here are the basic outlines of the production of monoclonal antibodies.