But, just as antibodies are finding increasing utility in cell biology, a new Food and Drug Administration classification for those products with clinical utility may affect researchers' access to the important technology (see accompanying story).
Monoclonal History MAbs were born in 1975, when Georges Kohler and Cesar Milstein at the Medical Research Council Laboratories in Cambridge, England, fused two types of cells to form a hybridoma. Part antibody-secreting B cell, part myeloma cell, a hybridoma combines the talents of each constituent, continuously releasing a single type of antibody when cultured in ascites fluid in a mouse's abdomen. This secretion of a monoclonal (single-type) antibody is in contrast to the response of an animal's challenged immune system, which is termed polyclonal because several types of antibodies are produced against a single type of foreign antigen, each zeroing in on a different portion of the target.
Hybridoma technology, the research community thought, ...
