Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology - Volume 9, Issue 6, 2008

Today, monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) are the fastest growing class of human pharmaceuticals. Nearly 30 antibodies and antibodyderivatives (Fab fragments, radioimmunoconjugates, immunoconjugates and Fc-fusion proteins) based on mice and human G-type immunoglobulins (IgGs) have been approved worldwide in around 20 years (see Fig. 1 and A Beck et al in this issue). Several hundreds more are investigated in clinica Read More

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) comprise the majority of protein candidates currently in clinical development because of their versatility as therapeutic agents. While traditionally associated with the biotechnology industry, mAb therapeutics are now being developed and marketed by most major pharmaceutical firms. A total of 21 products are approved in the US, with additional products marketed outside the US, and Read More

The development of new monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) is a still evolving field in finding new therapeutics. Structurally, mAbs have evolved over the past years by change from fully murine molecules to chimaeric antibodies or even humanized or fully human molecules. Although being “monoclonal” in terms of specificity, mAbs can be heterogeneous with respect to molecular features like microheterogeneity and glycos Read More

This article gives an overview about the development of human therapeutic antibodies generated by phage display. After an introduction to the method, the focus is on approved antibodies and those currently in clinical trials, 14 of which are described in detail.

This article provides an overview of the upstream technologies used in the industrial production of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) based on the cultivation of mammalian cells. More specifically, in a first section, after a short discussion of relevant biochemical characteristics of antibodies, we review the cell lines currently employed in commercial production and the methods of constructing and isolating producti Read More

The expanding field of monoclonal antibody-based pharmaceuticals has triggered increased interest in analytical characterization of these large proteins and in understanding of their heterogeneity and degradation pathways. As a result, a large number of enzymatic modifications as well as chemical and physical degradations have been reported in monoclonal antibodies in recent years. Most heterogeneity is related to chan Read More

Monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) are the fastest growing class of human pharmaceuticals. More than 20 MAbs have been approved and several hundreds are in clinical trials in various therapeutic indications including oncology, inflammatory diseases, organ transplantation, cardiology, viral infection, allergy, and tissue growth and repair. Most of the current therapeutic antibodies are humanized or human Immunoglobulins (I Read More

Recent advances in combinatorial protein engineering have made it possible to develop antibody-based and non-Ig protein scaffolds that can potentially substitute for most whole antibody-associated properties. In theory, many different natural human protein backbones are suitable to be used as recombinant templates for engineering : antibodyderived scaffolds, carrier proteins that display a single binding interface, back Read More

This study aims to test the predictive power of gene expression data derived from NIH's database dbEST, which collects gene expression results from a large number and variety of DNA array experiments. The motivation of this study is to make comparable experimental studies, which are usually performed only for one or a few tissues or organs, with a wide variety of other tissues. Confirmation of a good predictive power Read More

Apolipoprotein M (apoM) has been suggested to play a role in reverse cholesterol transport. Here we studied the influence of liver X-receptor (LXR) agonist on the transcriptional regulation of apoM. Studies were performed in murine liver and intestinal mucosal cells in vivo and in human intestinal Caco-2 cells in vitro. The expression of apoM was analyzed by quantitative real time PCR, and compared to well-established LX Read More