Reshaping human monoclonal antibodies for imaging and therapy

Current problems in obtaining suitable monoclonal antibodies (MoAbs) for in vivo imaging and therapy can now be bypassed using protein-engineering rather than conventional hybridoma technology. Rodent antibody binding sites can be grafted onto human acceptor antibodies thus reshaping the human MoAbs into reagents with more desired specificities. We successfully exploited this technology to produce two reshaped human antibodies with the same specificities and very similar binding abilities as demonstrated for the mouse antibodies H17E2 and HMFG1.