Thanks to all this research, we now know clearly that if a foreign substance ( antigen) is injected into a human body, some of the B cells in the human immune system will transform into plasma cells and begin to produce antibodies that bind to that antigen. Each B cell produces only one type of antibody; thus, different B cells will produce structurally different antibodies that bind to different parts of the antigen.

Lymphocytes that produce only one antibody were already known in the 1970s, in the form of multiple myeloma – a cancer that affects B cells. These antibodies were used to study their structure, but specific antibodies for a given antigen could not yet be produced.

In 1973, Jerrold Schwaber, an American biologist and geneticist, together with Edward Cohen, described a method for producing antibodies that involved hybrid human-mouse cells, or hybridomas.

 

Hybridoma technology is a method for producing large quantities of identical antibodies, which are also called monoclonal antibodies.

In 1975, Georges Köhler and Cesar Milstein succeeded in fusing myeloma cell lines with B cells to create hybridomas that could produce antibodies specific to known antigens and that were “ immortal”. Niels K. Jerne, Georges Köhler and Cesar Milstein later shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 for the discovery.

The time for the generation of the first monoclonal antibody was very close…..