How does the body create an effective antibody and can drug companies make synthetic antibodies?
In: Biology
Your Immune System develops B and T cells, those cells have randomized receptors, once they mature these cells travel to a lymph node and wait for their moment.
Macrophages (usually the first responders of the immune system) break apart enemies and display those parts on their surface, these parts are called **Antigens**.
Dendritic Cells than take those Antigens from the Macrophages and travel to the nearest lymph nodes where B and T Cells are waiting, it then looks for a Helper T Cell that has a randomized receptor in which this Antigen fits perfectly, once it found one, the Helper T Cell starts rapidly dividing, some of those Helper T Cells then travel to the B Cells and start looking for a B Cell that also has a fitting receptor for that Antigen.
Once such a B Cell is found it also starts dividing and those B Cells then produce proteins that also perfectly fit this Antigen, these proteins are called **Antibodies**.
I’m not too sure how exactly synthetic antibodies are made but I think it involves harvesting them from either humans or animals, or maybe even in test tubes.
Synthetic antibodies are a thing. They’re made by genetic engineering and grown in another organism, probably yeast but I’m not sure. These are used for treating rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, MS, psoriasis, and even migraines. Those recombinant antibodies are designed to target a molecule that’s important to causing the disease. They are extremely expensive though. For treating an infectious disease its much cheaper to simply harvest antibodies from people or animals which have already recovered from the illness. That’s the way anti venom and rabies treatment are made and its being explored for COVID-19 as well.
Simplifying a lot here to the point of being borderline wrong, but the gist of it is during the development of your immune system, cells in your bone marroe DNA in segments in pretty much virtually all combinations possible to generate antibodies.They then go through a process called negative selection. Those newly made cells with their receptors are exposed to proteins that are made in your body. If a B-Cell/Antibody complex recognizes those proteins, that cell is destroyed (idea is to prevent autoimmunity). T-cells also go through a similar process during their development, and they have an additional step of positive selection to make sure they can bind to the MHC molecules on antigen presenting cells.
After this is done, the cells that remain lay sorta dormant in your lymph nodes until some foreign invader comes in and bumps into the right cell. That cell is then activated, starts making clones of itself and its antibodies, and basically starts the process of mounting the adaptive immune response.
Latest Answers