Developed more than three decades ago but gaining new currency thanks to rapid advances in the field of biotechnology, monoclonal antibodies offer what many medical authorities view as some of the most promising—if persistently elusive—pathways for the treatment of cancer and other deadly diseases.
Put most simply, monoclonal antibodies (or MAb in medical shorthand) are antibodies that are identical, each derived from one type of immune cell and each a clone of a single parent cell. For science, that means that the extraordinarily specific nature of antibodies becomes a tool with wide and potentially revolutionary applications. In essence, they can be deployed to find a single targeted substance, such as an antigen found only on a cancer cell, and make it possible to pinpoint the cell and destroy it. In addition to cancer therapies, MAbs are also used in diagnostic tests for everything from pregnancy, to AIDS, to drug screening. Further, the antibodies can be used to lessen the problem of organ rejection in transplant patients and to treat viral diseases that are traditionally considered "untreatable." Scientists are looking at MAbs for a variety of illnesses including chronic inflammatory and infectious diseases.
Most drugs are small molecules – on the order of 10 to 100 atoms. Monoclonal antibodies are enormous in comparison, on the order of 2000 to 20,000 atoms.
Use and production of monoclonal antibodies