Common Sense for the Biochemist

The September 2005 issue of Nature Biotech is a very good read. The focus of this issue is on antibody engineering and manufacture, something that I take a particular interest in. The issue does a good job bringing the reader up to speed on the history of antibody therapuetics, the current crop of therapeutics (both commercially available and under development), methods of production, and where this subject is going. Of particular interest of for methods of production as is relates to the "pharming industry" is the Production of human monoclonal antibody in eggs of chimeric chickens. The authors of this research where able to create chimeric (partially transgenic) chickens that expressed significant quantities of recombinant human monoclonal antibodies only in the egg (3mg/egg). The levels of successful chicken chimeras formed seemed to be pretty high, however, no transgenic offspring were produced from the chimeras (so far). Here is a link to a review of this research in the same NBT issue. One more note, this issue also contains the research article that I talked about here regarding a plant-derived antibiotic resistant marker gene.