| In the latter part of the 19th century Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato showed that serum from human patients (or animals, typically horses) who had recovered from an infectious disease (typhus, diphtheria, etc) could be used to prevent or treat the same disease in other humans (indeed hyperimmune horse serum is still used to treat diphtheria today). Hyperimmune globulins obtained from human donors are used to treat a variety of infectious diseases today. However its use is restricted by availability and limited potency. For more than a century the widespread use of antibodies for treatment of a variety of diseases has awaited a practical method for production of specific antibodies, as well as the identification of the specific targets associated with a particular disease. Today many of those limitations have been resolved, and antibody therapy is the most active field in therapeutics. |
|
|
|