 Hey everybody, Dr. O here. In this video I want to talk about monoclonal antibodies. So let's start with the name monoclonal, means clones or copies, whole bunch of them, of a single type of antibody. So there are also polyclonal antibodies, but those are completely separate, we'll cover them later. So what are antibodies? Antibodies are, you know, think of them as locks or keys. They're basically, to me, I think of them as keys that are looking for locks. Now the locks are antigen cell surface markers. So antibodies can find and neutralize proteins or chemicals, all sorts of things. I'll give you some examples of how we would use these monoclonal antibodies later, but I'll talk about how they're produced first. So the key with the production of a monoclonal antibody, and I have to say that slowly or else it sounds kind of funny, is the production of hybridoma. So let's start there. So we take a mouse and we inject it with antigens, the cell surface markers, because we want this mouse's immune system to make antibodies against it. So usually you're going to use a series of injections. Once you're sure this mouse has been exposed to that antigen and is making antibodies to it, you take out the mouse's spleen and you basically blend it up into like a slurry, a spleen smoothie, and you take these spleen cells, and some of which are produced in the antibodies you want and some are certainly not. And then you mix it with myeloma cells. You would think, why in the world would you ever want to use cancer cells? Well, we want to make sure that these cells, these hybridomas are immortal and the only quote-unquote advantage of a cancer cell is that they've forgotten how to die. So you're going to take the spleen cells that are making antibodies and mix them with cancer cells, myeloma cells that have forgotten how to die, and you put them together and some of them are going to fuse. So some of the spleen cells and cancer cells are going to fuse together, forming hybridomas. So you put them in a culture like it says here, select and grow hybrid cells only. If they're just spleen cells, they're going to die. You put them in a culture where if they're just myeloma cells, they also won't survive and we get rid of them. So in this container on the right, all we have left is hybridomas. The next step is to separate them and find the hybridomas making the antibodies that we want. We don't care about other antibodies this mouse was producing. We want whichever specific antibody we're going after. So it says to separate these hybrid cells, these hybridomas, and find the ones that are producing antibodies that are desirable. They're the ones you want. Let's say it's right there in the middle. Let's say it's the dish in the middle producing those red antibodies is what we want. So you're going to take that hybridoma making the antibodies you want and then just keep it in an environment where it's going to keep churning out large batches of these antibodies. And this is already being used and you're going to see a lot more of these in the future. So there are different types of antibodies. You'll see we used to use primarily these chimeric monoclonal antibodies that were part mouse and part human, but they were really still more mouse. And then you saw these humanized antibodies that were mainly human. And now you're seeing fully human antibodies just so you know the reason for that is that over time if you were being dosed with a mouse-based monoclonal antibody, your immune system would start to recognize it as foreign and it would be a problem. It's the same reason that we now use fully human insulin, humulin, instead of using insulin from cows and pigs, those kind of things. All right, so now we have our hybridoma and we've gone through the process of producing the hybridoma that makes the antibodies we want. So what's this all about? Why does this matter? Well, I'll give you some examples. This is how you can churn out large quantities of a specific antibody. It's really the only way you can do it. So primarily it's being used as a diagnostic tool, but there are plenty of treatments and more showing up every day, every year. So there are probably at least a hundred different diagnostic tools that I know of that are using monoclonal antibodies and that number is going to continue to climb. But it's now being used in human therapy and has been for years. So there are drugs that people like myself with autoimmune diseases take. My grandmother had rheumatoid arthritis and she took a monoclonal antibody-based therapy as well. So I've already told you the one that I take is Humera, which is called Adalimumab. So Humera blocks tumor necrosis factor. So it's the drug of choice for me with my autoimmune diseases. There are monoclonal bodies that treat allergic asthma as well. Recently, with one of the last Ebola outbreaks, maybe you heard about ZMAP. So ZMAP is a special plant-based monoclonal antibody. But it can actually be used to treat people that have Ebola. Now there wasn't very much of it available, so it only helped a handful of people. But hopefully in the future this will stop Ebola outbreaks. Another one is the pregnancy test. So I just have a picture here in case you've never seen one. So a pregnancy test is actually, this is embedded with a monoclonal antibody looking for HCG, human-choreonic gonadotropin. So if a woman is pregnant and she has that in her urine, it's the actual monoclonal antibodies that are gonna sense that and show the positive pregnancy test. So back here to just our hybridoma page. So what's the deal with these? So where is the downside? Well, the biggest issue right now is their cost. They're super expensive. I would be paying at least 5,000 a month out of pocket for my monoclonal antibody drug if it wasn't for insurance. That's because they have to produce, it can take weeks to produce leaders of fluid to get the monoclonal antibodies that they need just for my doses of the drug humerus. So that's the biggest downside right now is that it's very, very time-consuming, which means it's very, very expensive. All right, so that is monoclonal antibodies and then some of their uses now, but in the future I think, again, anytime you wanna find a lock, you should be able to produce the key to go after it. So I think you're gonna see a lot of drugs, lot more diagnostic tests, et cetera, et cetera. I also, I'm kind of excited about some of the new uses with cancer therapies where they can hopefully send in these antibodies to find specific antigens on cancer cells. So as you see, the sky's the limit as far as how these are gonna be used. Okay, I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.