As a man who doesn’t have any academic back ground related to medicine or biology, anyone can get fascinated about the subject immunology, which has got that much potential within it. Think of a situation wherein you don’t have to take chemotherapy or medication for the dreadful diseases including cancer and HIV, they can be treated with some small quantity of medically processed serum, quite interesting isn’t it. Yes! It may be possible with the help of happenings in the research field of immunology. Everybody may have doubt with some questions about who is healthy, which is considered to be normal, when do we require to take medicine, etc. this field immunology has got the answer to most of all these questions.
Influenza fever is a disease due to the infection of virus; the body reacts in such a way that it starts producing the antibody against the virus for its destruction. As a result, due to the increase in the activity immune system and as a natural means of defense to kill the virus, our body increases its temperature (these viruses requires elevated temperature to kill them). Usually we used to treat symptom, the elevated temperature by giving an antipyretic drug, which cools down the body temperature instead of killing the virus that requires an antibiotic. The part of the immune system in this infection is the production of specific antibody against the virus that is done by a B-lymphocyte. These lymphocytes screen the surface of the virus and produce the antibody, which has got binding codes to the respective part of the virus. These cite specific antibodies binds to the corresponding part, the epitope of the virus and brings about the destruction of it with the help of other components of the immune system like, complements, interleukins, etc.
this helps the system to revert back to normal activities.
Therefore, it becomes obvious that the antibodies performing the magical role against the pathogen invasion, now that became the interest of modern biologists to prepare the separate line of the antibodies having similar physical and chemical properties to perform required function. The process of immunizing an individual to a particular disease using the tools of immunology is vaccination. In this process, a protein molecule prepared artificially that mimics the pathogen but not causing disease is injected into the body of the individual, this in turn stimulates the B-cell to produce the antibody against the particular pathogen and will keep in memory, if the pathogen enters body in future then antibodies will be produced against them.
But in practice, there are a lot of areas where we are very much in need these antibodies like identification of certain protein molecules, separation of certain molecules, therapeutic value like diagnosing the diseases, etc., which requires single clone of antibodies that is having similar physical and chemical properties. In the year 1975, Cesar Milstein and Georges Kohler in England have developed a technique called ‘Hybridoma’ technology by which it was made possible to produce the monoclonal antibodies. Using this technique a pool of antibody with extreme specificity can be produced.