Abstract:

When Paul Erlich postulated the idea of "magic bullet" in the early part of the 20th century, he only had the findings of a research, regarding the presence of humoral immunity, performed by Emil von Behring and Kitasato Shibasaburo. There was no concrete data about the presence of antibodies in those days. According to the idea, "if a compound could be made that selectively targeted a disease-causing organism, then a toxin for that organism could be delivered along with the agent of selectivity." If the point in the technology of the monoclonal antibody generation that we have reached from the '80s to present is considered, it can be claimed that we have started to go beyond the technology realizing the fighting strategy primarily proposed by Paul Erlich at those times. The period starting with the production of fully murine antibodies in the first years showed a fast-growing trend with the help of recombinant DNA technology established around the same years. Today, we can generate various "magic bullets", being so much beyond what Paul Erlich might dream, with the contributions of fields such as proteomics and bioinformatics. Those range from human-chained antibodies found in different species with longer half-life to multifunctional antibodies forms, and from toxin-conjugated antibodies to novel designs, which may be considered as radical. Furthermore, the bullets that we can produce are completely target-specific. In spite of all these developments, we cannot take actions sufficiently quickly due to some constraints of recent antibody development techniques. In cancer cases, we are still mostly obliged to resort to our conventional guns. Fortunately, monoclonal antibody technology is expected to make much more progress within 10-20 years than it has made in the past quarter-century due to rapid progress in the field and current technological capabilities. Thus, protein-based biotechnological drugs, of which the current global market share is more than 25%, are expected to replace most chemical-based conventional therapeutics and dominate most of the market in the near future.

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