Recombinant Antibodies for Cancer Immunotherapy: Recombinant Anti-muc1 and Anti-erbb2 Antibodies: Tools for Breast Cancer Detection and Therapy

Recombinant antibodies have made a tremendous impact on biomedical research and are increasingly being used as clinical diagnostic and therapeutic reagents. The discovery of the tumor markers, opened a new era in the development of antibody-targeted cancer therapy. This book evaluates the potential of recombinant derivatives of an anti-MUCI and an anti- ErbB2 Mabs to serve as tools for breast cancer detection and therapy. To explore the potential of Mabs in antibody-targeted cancer therapy, a novel IgG-toxin immunoconjugate is described. This work provides evidences that bivalent antibody-toxin molecules (200 kDa) are superior to the corresponding recombinant monovalent immunotoxins (69 kDa) in killing tumor cells in culture and human carcinoma xenografts in nude mice, suggesting that higher avidity and longer residence time may outweigh tumor penetration. Although many challenges must be addressed before the approaches mentioned in this book become standard tools for cancer therapy, continued research in this area will feed the clinical product pipeline and play an increasingly important role in finding the "magical bullet" for cancer.