[Targeted therapy by monoclonal antibodies]

Human monoclonal antibodies are virtually indispensable for immunotherapy of cancer, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, or organ transplantation. The hybridoma technique, developed by Georges Köhler and César Milstein in 1975, has been shown to be most and highly producible method for generating murine monoclonal antibodies. However, poor results were obtained when it was administered in human bodies. With development of biotechnology, human monoclonal antibodies have been manufactured with higher efficiency. A major hindrance of producing therapeutic human monoclonal antibodies is the lack of an appropriate strategy for determining and selecting the antibodies that would be effective in vivo. In this review, we give an overview of the present techniques on therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.