[Construction and clinical application of chimeric antibodies]

To reduce the high immunogenicity of mouse monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) in man, mouse/human chimeric antibodies have been generated in two ways. The more simple method is to construct chimeric antibodies in which the variable regions from the mouse MAbs are linked to human constant regions. The second is to graft the complementarity determining regions from the variable regions of mouse MAbs into human variable regions. So far, more than a hundred of chimeric antibodies have been reported and about twenty-five have been tried for immunotherapy of various human diseases. In the near future, many mouse/human chimeric antibodies will be commercially available.