Researchers find quick way to make human monoclonal antibodies against flu

Human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs)--highly specific, identical, infection-fighting proteins produced in large quantities in the lab in cell lines that are derived from a single cell--against influenza can be rapidly produced in the lab, according to a new report from scientists supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Using cells drawn from volunteers inoculated with seasonal influenza vaccine, the investigators made influenza-specific mAbs in just a few weeks rather than the typical two to three months. The new technique could potentially be used to rapidly create mAbs for a range of uses, the team says.

Rafi Ahmed, Ph.D., and Jens Wrammert, Ph.D., of Emory Vaccine Center of the School of Medicine, Atlanta, and their coworkers collaborated with Patrick Wilson, Ph.D., and J. Donald Capra, M.D., and others from the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Oklahoma City. They describe their new method in an advance online publication in Nature. The research was supported by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).

The first therapeutic mAb was approved for human use in 1986 and there are now more than 20 Food and Drug Administration-approved mAbs, including two human mAbs, most of which are used to treat certain cancers or immunological diseases. Human mAbs have long been envisioned as possible treatments for acute or chronic infections, but various technical barriers have slowed their development.

“With this new technique for making human monoclonal antibodies efficiently and quickly, Drs. Wilson and Ahmed and their colleagues have made a significant advance,” says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. “Their accomplishment opens the way to producing mAbs that potentially could be used diagnostically or therapeutically not only for influenza but for other infectious diseases as well.”

In addition to being relatively quick to make, the influenza mAbs also bound tightly to virus strains in the seasonal influenza vaccine, the scientists determined. Such high affinity for the vaccine’s viruses suggests that the mAbs would also bind well to the circulating viruses targeted by the vaccine and thus could be used either as a therapy or as a way to diagnose the strain of influenza virus an individual is infected with, say the investigators.