UK marks 40th anniversary of invention of monoclonal antibodies

It is forty years this Thursday since César Milstein and George Kohler’s first paper describing the generation of monoclonal antibodies appeared in Nature. Since then, the technique has been applied on an extraordinary scale, with the technology forming the basis of a third of all new medicines introduced worldwide and six of the ten best selling drugs in the world.

Celebrating the anniversary this week, the UK Medical Research Council said the work underlines the importance of lab-based discovery science in the development of novel therapeutics.

Monoclonal antibodies, multiple copies of a single antibody against a specific target generated in rodent cells, were invented at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Researchers had been striving for many years to find a way to make large numbers of tailored, identical antibodies as research tools and potentially for clinical applications.

Further research at the LMB in the late 1980s and early 1990s, by scientists including Greg Winter, went on to devise techniques to humanise the rodent antibodies, making them suitable for use in humans.

These constructs have been used in the development of over half of marketed antibody therapies today, including the arthritis drug Humira, the multiple sclerosis drug Lemtrada and the breast cancer drug, Herceptin.

Monoclonal antibody drugs had global revenues of nearly $75 billion in 2013 and over the years the MRC has received more than £580 million in royalties on its monoclonal antibody portfolio.

Some marketed products were developed by spin-outs from the MRC research and others via out licensing to pharmaceutical companies.
The first fully human monoclonal antibody to gain approval was the rheumatoid arthritis treatment Humira (adalimumab) in 2003. Humira is now the world’s best-selling drug with 2014 sales of almost $12 billion.
The monoclonal antibody that forms the basis of Humira was originally discovered by Cambridge Antibody Technology, the spin out formed by the MRC, Greg Winter and other LMB scientists, to commercialise humanised monoclonal antibodies.
The MRC also funded research in the late 1980s that led to the discovery of alemtuzumab (Lemtrada, formerly Campath) a treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.
In 2014 Lemtrada was approved as a treatment for early-stage multiple sclerosis in the US and UK and is now making a real impact in the treatment of this difficult and disabling condition, 30 years on from its beginnings in the lab.