The most natural drug

Researchers devise new method of creating human antibodies to flu, other illnesses

In the fight against infection, the human immune system isn’t ready for a war.

Vaccines push the immune system to create defenses against illness, but they take time to work. A new process developed by scientists at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) and Emory University stands to revolutionize the process.

In an advance online publication in Nature, the researchers describe a method that can identify and clone human antibodies specifically tailored to fight infections. The new technology holds the potential to quickly and effectively create new treatments for influenza and a variety of other communicable diseases.

When an infection invades, the immune system goes to work manufacturing antibodies to fight it. Most of the antibodies created will have no effect, but a very few will bond to the invader and replicate to neutralize the enemy.

The new process develops a “smart bomb” for the immune system, using fully human monoclonal antibodies specifically designed to fight the infection without doing any harm to the body. The work was led by OMRF’s Patrick Wilson, Ph.D., and J. Donald Capra, M.D., and Emory’s Rafi Ahmed, Ph.D., and Jens Wrammert, Ph.D.

In the past, it took years of work and great expense to create what are known as monoclonal antibodies—lab-produced antibodies derived from a single line of cells. “It was kind of the ‘needle in a haystack’ approach,” said OMRF’s Wilson, senior author on the paper. “The problem is they couldn’t pick the cells that made the antibodies against the pathogens that you wanted to fight.”

A second method, making hybrid antibodies from mouse B cells (white blood cells that produce infection-fighting antibodies), is faster but more dangerous. If the proteins in the hybrid antibodies weren’t compatible, the body could reject the antibodies or react with them in unforeseen ways.

The new process doesn’t use traditional antibody derivation methods or human-mouse hybrids. Instead, the OMRF and Emory researchers isolated antibody-secreting cells (plasma cells) from people who had received the influenza vaccine, then cloned the antibody genes from these cells.