Production of Monoclonal Antibodies in Swine

A major objective of this laboratory has been to improve the growth performance of swine with immunological manipulation. During the progress of the program, we demonstrated that a mouse monoclonal antibody (MAb) was able to enhance the somatogenic effect of porcine growth hormone (pGH) when administered in an experimental rat model (1 ,2 ). However, the concern of this type of approach was that the repeated injections of swine with mouse MAb would induce antimouse Ig responses, thus diminishing the effect of the future applications of the same mouse MAb. A similar problematic situation was clearly evidenced in cancer patients following immunotherapy with mouse MAb (3 ). Therefore, we attempted to develop MAb of swine origin as an alternative to overcome the potential difficulty in crossing the interspecies barrier.