Generation of stable cell clones expressing mixtures of human antibodies.

Therapeutic monoclonal antibodies, a highly successful class of biological drugs, are conventionally manufactured in mammalian cell lines. A recent approach to increase the therapeutic effectiveness of monoclonal antibodies has been to combine two or more of them; however this increases the complexity of development and manufacture. To address this issue a method to efficiently express multiple monoclonal antibodies from a single cell has been developed and we describe here the generation of stable cell clones that express high levels of a human monoclonal antibody mixture.

Human immunoglobulin repertoires against tetanus toxoid contain a large and diverse fraction of high-affinity promiscuous V(H) genes.

To study the contribution of antibody light (L) chains to the diversity and binding properties of immune repertoires, a phage display repertoire was constructed from a single human antibody L chain and a large collection of antibody heavy (H) chains harvested from the blood of two human donors immunized with tetanus toxoid (TT) vaccine. After selection for binding to TT, 129 unique antibodies representing 53 variable immunoglobulin H chain (V(H)) gene rearrangements were isolated. This panel of anti-TT antibodies restricted to a single variable immunoglobulin L chain (V(L)) could be organized into 17 groups binding non-competing epitopes on the TT molecule.