I recently attended a seminar given by a post-doc in Paul Sondel's lab at
the University of Wisconsin. He briefly mentioned a very interesting
monoclonal construct directed against one of the melanoma-specific
antigens. Basically, it consisted of the Vh and Vl chains, plus the
linker region and cysteine residues, but attached to the Fc end was the
zeta chain of CD3 (see the ASCII drawing below)
Vh Vh
\ /
Vl Vl
| |
|-S - S -|
| |
|-S - S -|
| |
| |}-- TRANSMEMBRANE DOMAIN
| |
/ \
Zeta Zeta
However, no mention was given about how such a molecule would
function. It seems that without being inserted into an approptiate T
cell, there would be no signal to transduce.
Hence, it would seem that the most practical use would be to engineer T
cells to express this construct, expand them in culture and adoptively
transfer the expanded cells. A heck of a lot of work. Could there be any
potential application for the IV administration of such an antibody? Can
anyone think of a less labor-intensive way to use such a construct? Any
speculations?
Doug
--
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| A student asked his master, "Master, what is the Way?" |
| The master slapped the student, and the student went away |
| enlightened. |
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| Douglas H. Thamm, VMD | Resident, Medical Oncology |
|thammd at svm.vetmed.wisc.edu | School of Veterinary Medicine |
|dthamm at dolphin.upenn.edu | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
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