Frequently Asked Questions about the Use of Antibodies in Medical Applications & the Field of Antibody Immunotherapy.

When it comes to the field of antibody immunotherapy , a lot of people are in the dark about its wide scale of uses for all forms of medical applications like disease diagnosis and even treatments , and thus in this brief Q&A blogpost we’ll cover many questions that will show these applications to clarify the great importance of these agents.

Could you remind me please what antibodies are in the first place?

Antibodies are immuno globulin proteins or Ig domains or Y-shaped glycoproteins that are secreted either in their soluble form or as membrane memory proteins from B cells, and they’re highly flexible and can change their functions.

And can you mention how they can be used in medical diagnosis?

Sure, for example several immuno-diagnostic methods based on the estimation of the complexes of antigen-antibody are used to diagnose infectious diseases, such as:

1-ELISA

2-immunofluorescence

3-Western blot

4-immunodiffusion

5-immunoelectrophoresis

6-magnetic immunoassay.

And mainly that occurs through the estimation of antibody levels in the blood is the main method most of these methods stem from like serology which is the study of the plasma serum.

Can you provide more specific examples?

Sure , if you direct a titre of antibodies towards Epstein-Barr virus and through estimation from the blood these antibodies aren’t detected , it means that the disease doesn’t existed or happened from a very long time based on the decay of B cells that produced them in the first place .

Another example is the measurement of different levels of Immunoglobulins or specific antibodies to be able to tell the levels of damage for example in the liver , more specifically an elevated IgG would indicate viral hepatitis , autoimmune hepatitis & cirrhosis as is the case with each specific type of antibody.

You’ve mentioned external types of diseases mostly, what about auto-immune disorders within the body?

That also can be detected through blood tests, because it occurs due to the binding of the antibodies to the epitope of the body cells, an example of that is the direction of antibodies towards the antigen of Red blood cells for the disease of hemolytic anemia to detect coombs disease.

What else can these antibodies be used for?

Monoclonal antibodies in immunotherapy are used for the treatment of multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and severaltypes of cancer including non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, colorectal cancer, head and neck cancer and breast cancer.

Global Allied Pharmaceuticals (GAP) can be contacted on www.gapsos.com.