🧫 Creating Antibodies from the field of Master Mind Science (MMSCI) 🥽
Shared from the nutrition lab of: Joseph Mercado 🥼
Article Author: Sandra Blakeslee 👩
Content Contributor: New York Times 🌎
To: Science Lover 🧤
Blog Post #1188 📌
Re: Growing Antibodies in Plants 🪴
Date and Time: Wednesday, January 26, 2022 at 11:08 a.m. ⏰
Dear Science Lover,
Scientists have developed a technique for using plants to grow monocolonal antibodies, important proteins widely used in medicine to diagnose and treat diseases.
Monoclonal antibodies now in use, derived from mouse cells, are expensive and are sometimes rejected by patients.
The new technique for producing human monoclonal antibodies in plants may lower the cost from $5,000 a gram to 10 cents a gram as well as eliminate the rejection problem, said Dr. Andrew Hiatt, a molecular biologist at the Scripps Research Clinic and Foundation in La Jolla, Calif., where the technique is being developed.
The work is described in the current issue of the journal Nature.
To make monoclonal antibodies, scientists inject a mouse with a foreign substance such as a human cancer cell or plant virus.
The mouse’s immune system creates an antibody that recognizes and binds to the foreign substance, and attracts other immune system cells to destroy it.
The antibody is isolated and fused to a line of cancer cells.
Because cancer cells keep dividing indefinitely, the antibody can then be produced in vast quantities.
Linked to cancer drugs or radioactive molecules, they are injected into patients where they go straight to cancer cells, which are destroyed by the drugs or radiation. The antibodies are also used to target specific kinds of cells in a wide variety of diagnostic tests, including home pregnancy kits.
To make the antibodies in plants, Dr. Hiatt said, scientists create the mouse antibody in the usual way.
Then instead of fusing the antibodies to cancer cells, they clone the genes that make up the antibody.
They insert the genes inside a special bacterium that crosses easily into plant cells.
The experiment only works, Dr. Hiatt said, when the mouse antibody is divided into its two natural components, called a light end and heavy end of the molecule.
The genes for the light end of the protein are put in one plant, he said, while the genes for heavy end are put in another plant.
When two plants grow to maturity, Dr. Hiatt said, they are cross pollinated. A quarter of the new generation plants naturally assemble the light and heavy end of the molecule into functional antibodies.
Three Possible Uses:
Dr. Hiatt said his laboratory will explore three possible uses for the plant-animal antibodies.
Plants containing antibodies specific to pollutants could be grown in contaminated soils.
The plants would take up the pollutants inside their cells where the antibodies would bind to them, rendering them harmless.
A second application involves making mouse antibodies against important plant viruses and fungi.
When a plant is attacked by the virus or fungus, its cells would contain waiting antibodies to immobilize the attack, providing an alternative to pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.
A third use is in human medicine.
Researchers are experimenting with mouse antibodies extracted from the plants that specifically target human lung cancer cells and kill them.
A key problem is that the human immune system recognizes the mouse protein as foreign and tries to kill it.
Animal antibodies grown in plants, Dr. Hiatt said, may do away with this problem.
Content Source: New York Times
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