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Joan Stephenson, PhD

JAMA. 2001;285:1283.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

For more than two decades, Abraham Karpas, MD, of Cambridge University in England, and colleagues worked to find a way to use human cells to produce monoclonal antibodies. These highly specific antibodies are produced by hybridomas (hybrid cells created by fusing an antibody-secreting B cell with a myeloma cell), which can grow indefinitely in culture, churning out only the antibody produced by the original B cell.

But the technology traditionally used to produce monoclonal antibodies uses mouse cells, which reduces their usefulness in humans. Now, however, Karpas and colleagues have succeeded in developing a line of human myeloma cells, making it possible to produce fully human hybridomas.

The researchers described fusing the human myeloma cells with B cells from a patient with HIV to create several different human hybridomas. Like mouse hybridomas, the human hybrid cells are stable and continuously secrete large quantities of human immunoglobulin, the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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