hey everybody doctor over here in this video I want to talk about monoclonal antibody with the name monoclonal means clones or copies a whole bunch of them of a single type of antibody so there are also polyclonal antibodies but those are completely separate we'll cover them later so what are antibodies antibodies are you don't think about miss locks or keys they're basically to me I think of them as keys that are looking for locks now the locks are antigen cell surface markers so antibodies can find and neutralize proteins or chemicals all sorts of things I'll give you some examples of how we would use these monoclonal antibodies later but I'll talk about how they're produced first so the key with the production of a monoclonal antibody and I have to say that slowly or else it sounds kind of funny is the production of hybridomas let's start there so we take a mouse and we inject it with antigens the cell surface markers because we want this Mouse's immune system to make antibodies against it so usually you're gonna use a series of injections once you're sure this mouse has been exposed to that antigen is and it's making antibodies to it you take out the mouse's spleen and you basically blend it up into like a slurry a spleen smoothie and you take these spleen cells and some of which you're producing the antibodies you want some are certainly not and then you mix it with myeloma cells you would think why in the world would you ever want to use cancer cells well we want to make sure that these cells these hybridomas are immortal and the only quote-unquote advantage of a cancer cell is that they'd forgotten how to die so you're gonna take the spleen cells that are making antibodies and mix them with cancer cells myeloma cells that have forgotten how to die then you put them together and some of them are gonna fuse so some of the spleen cells and cancer cells are gonna fuse together forming hybridomas so you put them in a culture like it says here select and grow hybrid cells only if they're just spleen cells they're going to die you put them in a culture where if they're just myeloma cells they also won't survive and we get rid of them so in this container on the right all we have left is is hybridomas the next step is to separate them and find the hybridomas making the antibodies that we want we don't care about other antibodies this mouse was producing we want which whichever specific antibody we're going after so it says to separate these hybrid cells these hybridomas and find find the ones that are producing antibodies that are desirable they're the ones you want let's say it's right there in the middle let's say it's the the dish in the middle producing those red antibodies is what we want so you're gonna take that hybridoma making the antibodies you want and then just keep it in an environment where it's going to keep churning out large batches these antibodies and this is this is already being used and you're gonna see a lot more of these in the future so there are different types of antibodies you'll see we used to use primarily these chimeric monoclonal antibodies that were part mouse and part human but they were really still more mouse and then you saw these humanized antibodies that were mainly human and now you're seeing fully human antibodies just saying oh the reason for that is that over time if you were if you were being dosed with a mouse based monoclonal antibody your immune system would start to recognize it as foreign and it would be a problem it's the same reason that we now use fully human insulin humulin instead of using insulin from from cows and pigs those kind of things all right so now we have our hybridoma and we've gone through the process of producing the hybridoma that makes the antibodies we want so what's this all about why does this matter well I'll give you some examples this is how you can churn out large quantities of a specific antibody the only way you can do it so primarily it's being used as a diagnostic tool but there are plenty of treatments and more showing up every day every every year so there are probably at least a hundred different diagnostic tools that I know of that are using monoclonal antibodies and that number is going to continue to climb but it's now being used in human therapy and has been for years so there are drugs that people like myself with autoimmune diseases take my grandmother had rheumatoid arthritis and she and she took a monoclonal antibody era P as well so I've already told you the one that I take is Humira which is called a dilemma map so Humera blocks tumor necrosis factor so it's it's the the drug of choice for me if my autoimmune diseases they're monoclonal bodies that treat allergic asthma as well recently with the with one of the last Ebola outbreaks maybe you heard about Z map so Z map is a special plant-based monoclonal antibody but it was it it can actually be used to treat people that have Ebola now there wasn't very much of it available so it only helped a handful of people but hopefully in the future this will stop Ebola outbreaks another one is the pregnancy test so I've just have a picture here in case you've never seen one so a pregnancy test is actually this isn't is embedded with a monoclonal by looking for HCG human chorionic gonadotropin sofa the woman is pregnant and she has that in her urine the it's the actual monoclonal antibodies that are gonna sense that and and show the positive pregnancy test so back here to you know just our hybridoma page so what's the deal with these so what where's the downside well the the biggest issue right now is is it's their cost they're super expensive I would be paying at least five thousand a month out of pocket for my monoclonal by drug if it wasn't for insurance and that's because they have to produce it it take it can take weeks to produce liters of fluid to get the to get the monoclonal antibodies that they need just for my doses of the drug chimera so that's the biggest downside right now is that it's very very time consuming which means it's very very expensive alright so that is monoclonal antibodies and then some of their uses now but in the future I think any again any time you want to find a lock you should be able to produce the key to go after it so I'm here to see a lot of drugs a lot more diagnostic tests etc etc I also I'm kind of excited about some of the new uses with cancer therapies where they can hopefully send in these antibodies to to find specific antigens on cancer cells so as you see the the sky's the limit as far as how these are going to be used okay I hope this helps have a wonderful day be blessed