today's video is all about monoclonal antibodies if we look at the term monoclonal antibodies it really means antibodies from a single clone of cells so basically we take a cell clone it a whole bunch of times and then make all the clones produce antibodies which we can then isolate and call monoclonal antibodies if you remember from the immune system topic antibodies are small proteins produced by our white blood cells specifically b lymphocytes or b cells and their job is to help us fight disease which they can do by binding onto foreign material called antigens for example on this bacteria these molecules in the cell wall could be considered antigens because they're small molecules that are foreign to our body so when b cells detect these antigens they'll produce loads of antibodies which we can show as these little y shapes and as they spread out they can bind to any bacteria that have that particular antigen so if there was another bacteria of the same type which had the same antigens then the antibodies would be able to bind onto that bacteria as well when we talk about monoclonal antibodies though we're normally referring to ones made in a laboratory to make them on a large scale we need a lot of b lymphocyte clones but unfortunately they don't normally divide very quickly to fix this we have to combine them with fast dividing tumor cells and once the b cells and tumor cells fuse they form something called a hybridoma which still produces lots of antibodies like a b lymphocyte but also divides rapidly like a tumor cell so by leaving the hybridoma cell to divide for a while in a petri dish we end up with an army of hybridoma cells that all produce identical antibodies that we can then collect and purify another thing you need to know is that to get the b lymphocytes that produce the correct antibody in the first place we normally inject an animal like a mouth with the antigen that we want our monoclonal antibody to bind to because the antigen is now within the mouse the mouse's immune system is going to generate a response and produce loads of b lymphocytes that are specific to that antigen and this means that we can easily isolate to those b cells and combine them with our fast dividing tumor cells now the great thing about monoclonal antibodies is that they always bind to one specific thing so by choosing the right b lymphocyte we can effectively create antibodies that bind to anything we want so we can make them to bind to a particular protein or cell within our body or a harmful pathogen or chemical we can also attach things to the bottom of antibodies like drugs fluorescent proteins or radioactive material for example if we had some monoclonal antibodies that were specific to an antigen on cancer cells then we could locate and destroy the cancer by attaching drugs or radioactive material onto the monoclonal antibodies and then injecting them into the patient where they'd find their way to the cancer cells and destroy them anyways that's everything for this video so if you enjoyed it then please do give us a like and subscribe and hopefully we'll see you again soon