- Humanized antibody
Humanized antibodies or chimeric antibodies are a type of
monoclonal antibody that have been synthesized usingrecombinant DNA technology to circumvent the clinical problem ofimmune response to foreignantigens . The standard procedure of producing monoclonal antibodies yields mouse antibodies. Althoughmurine antibodies are very similar to human ones there are differences, and the humanimmune system recognizes mouse antibodies as foreign, rapidly removing them from circulation and causing systemic inflammatory effects.Humanized antibodies are produced by merging the
DNA that encodes the binding portion of a monoclonal mouse antibody with human antibody-producing DNA. One then usesmammal iancell culture s to express this DNA and produce these half-mouse and half-human antibodies that are not as immunogenic as the murine variety.Alternatives
A solution to this problem would be to generate human antibodies directly from humans. However, this is not easy, primarily because it is not clearly ethical to challenge humans with antigen in order to produce antibody. Furthermore, it is not easy to generate human antibodies against human tissues.
ee also
* Examples in
monoclonal antibody , for clinical examplestemplate group
title = Humanized and chimeric antibodies
list =
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.