The production of more useful monoclonal antibodies 2. The use of somatic-cell genetic and recombinant-DNA technology to tailor-make monoclonal antibodies.

In last month's issue(1) Matthew Scharff and his colleagues discussed recent improvements in the technique of making monoclonal antibodies by cell fusion. However, not all the monoclonal antibodies generated by hybridoma technology have all of the properties required for a particular task. This second part of a two-part review deals with ways in which these first-generation reagents can be improved by identifying somatic-cell mutants with the desired properties or by engineering new and even novel molecules using recombinant DNA technology.