Human monoclonal antibodies from transgenic mice

Since the 1986 regulatory approval of muromonomab-CD3, a mouse monoclonal antibody (MAb) directed against the T cell CD3epsilon antigen, MAbs have become an increasingly important class of therapeutic compounds in a variety of disease areas ranging from cancer and autoimmune indications to infectious and cardiac diseases. However, the pathway to the present acceptance of therapeutic MAbs within the pharmaceutical industry has not been smooth. A major hurdle for antibody therapeutics has been the inherent immunogenicity of the most readily available MAbs, those derived from rodents. A variety of technologies have been successfully employed to engineer MAbs with reduced immunogenicity. Implementation of these antibody engineering technologies involves in vitro optimization of lead molecules to generate a clinical candidate. An alternative technology, involving the engineering of strains of mice to produce human instead of mouse antibodies, has been emerging and evolving for the past two decades. Now, with the 2006 US regulatory approval of panitumumab, a fully human antibody directed against the epidermal growth factor receptor, transgenic mice expressing human antibody repertoires join chimerization, CDR grafting, and phage display technologies, as a commercially validated antibody drug discovery platform. With dozens of additional transgenic mouse-derived human MAbs now in clinical development, this new drug discovery platform appears to be firmly established within the pharmaceutical industry.