With the advent of monoclonal antibody technology, two things have become increasingly obvious. First, that these molecules will be needed in kilogram quantities for the treatment of a variety of malignancies, and second that antibodies of human, and not murine, origin will ultimately be the molecules of choice. Verax has been developing a novel system for the mass culture of murine hybridoma cells and now wishes to extend our development work to studies of human hybridoma technology. Of particular interest is an analysis of the feasibility of adapting human hybridoma cells to our current cell immobilizing matrix material. We also wish to develop minimal culture medium for the growth of these cells and to select high immunoglobulin producing clones from large populations of cells. While it may seem that this work will be a slight modification of our existing technology, we feel that significant differences will exist between human/human and mouse/mouse hybridomas in terms of growth and production potential, and that a definition of these differences will require considerable time and energy. Moreover, it seems likely that the conditions necessary for efficient production of human monoclonal antibodies will be different than those required for mouse monoclonal antibodies.
