what are they, the process and advantages and disadvantages?
thank you!
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They’re antibodies, but all exactly the same (as opposed to a polyclonal mixture).
Traditionally you get a monoclonal by diluting a polyclonal B cell culture obtained from an immunized animal, to the point where you’re left with just one cell per culture vessel (microplate wells, at that scale) and then growing them out again to usable numbers. Then you do a bunch of screening experiments to find actually useful clones.
The main advantage of a monoclonal is that because it’s all the same molecule, it’s consistent in its effects. That’s important when you’re looking to use it as a drug (which are also all the same active ingredient molecule, 99.99% of the time). Having to engineer all the optimizations that go into a monoclonal, into *every clone of a polyclonal*, would be a crazy amount of work as well.
The main disadvantage is that if your monoclonal raises an immune response of its own, which they notoriously do despite our best optimization efforts, anti-drug antibodies can totally stop its intended effects. Adalimumab is a textbook case. Also, if your monoclonal is intended to combat pathogens, a rapidly mutating pathogen might escape it — as omicron-lineage SARS2 did with sotrovimab and some others.
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