Transgenic milk as a method for the production of recombinant antibodies

Recombinant antibodies and their derivatives are increasingly being used as therapeutic agents. Clinical applications of antibodies often require larg e amounts of highly purified molecules, sometimes for multiple treatments. The development of very efficient expression systems is essential to the fu ll exploitation of the antibody technology. Production of recombinant prote in in the milk of transgenic dairy animals is currently being tested as an alternative to plasma fractionation for the manufacture of a number of bloo d factors (human antithrombin, human alpha-1-antitrypsin, human serum album in, factor IX). The ability to routinely yield mg/ml levels of antibodies a nd the scale-up flexibility make transgenic production an attractive altern ative to mammalian cell culture as a source of large quantities of biothera peutics. The following review examines the potential of transgenic expressi on for the production of recombinant therapeutic antibodies. (C) 1999 Elsev ier Science B.V. All rights reserved.