Nature PastCast, August 1975: Antibodies’ ascendency to blockbuster drug status
Nature Podcast
podcast@nature.com
4.5 • 893 Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
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Summary
This year, Nature celebrates its 150th birthday. To mark this anniversary we’re rebroadcasting episodes from our PastCast series, highlighting key moments in the history of science.
They’re found in home-testing kits for pregnancy, hospital tests for MRSA, and in six out of ten of the best-selling drugs today. But monoclonal antibodies have kept a surprisingly low profile since their debut in a Nature paper in 1975. This podcast follows them from that time through patent wars, promising drug trials and finally to blockbuster status today.
This episode was first broadcast in August 2013.
From the archive:
Continuous cultures of fused cells secreting antibody of predefined specificity, by Köhler & Milstein
Margaret Thatcher speech clips courtesy of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Nature Pastcast, each month raiding Nature's archive and looking at key moments in science. |
| 0:06.0 | In this show, the beginnings of some blockbusters in the 1970s. |
| 0:23.6 | Nature, August the 7th, 1975 From the late 19th, |
| 0:24.6 | scientists began to wonder whether antibodies could be the next magic bullet in medicine. |
| 0:44.4 | I had no idea that it was going to have the impact it had now. I mean, I don't think we, at that point, I think anyone had realized the importance. |
| 0:54.7 | Volume 256. Continuous cultures of fused cells secreting antibody of predefined specificity. |
| 1:02.8 | Today monoclonal antibodies are a very important part of the biotechnology industry, yet they're very |
| 1:08.3 | little known. It's very interesting. If you mention to people the drug |
| 1:12.3 | Heseptin, which is used for breast cancer, most people will have heard of that drug, but they |
| 1:17.1 | will not understand that it's actually based on a monoclonal antibody. I'm Lara Marks. I'm a historian of medicine based at King's College London. I'm working on a book on the history of monoclonal antibodies and their transformation of healthcare since the 1970s. |
| 1:40.3 | The reason monoclonal antibodies are so useful is because they're very particular about which cells they target and then attach to, and that means that they can be used very specifically. |
| 1:53.2 | The manufacture of predefined, specific antibodies, by means of permanent tissue culture, cell lines, is of general interest. G. Curler and C. Milstein, |
| 2:03.4 | MRC, Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Hills Road, Cambridge. |
| 2:07.5 | Cesar Milstein was the son of Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants in Argentina. He trained in chemistry |
| 2:14.8 | and fleed Argentina in the early 1960s after the political turmoil |
| 2:19.4 | brought about by the military coup. |
| 2:22.5 | He took up a position at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1963. |
| 2:29.0 | What I find fascinating is that everyone knows about Crick and Watson, but don't know about Milstein, and yet they |
| 2:36.6 | were based in the same laboratory, although working a decade apart. |
| 2:47.7 | Once Milstein arrived at the laboratory of Molecular Biology, he began investigating the mechanism |
| 2:53.3 | behind antibody diversity. Like many other scientists at the time, he was puzzled about why it was |
| 3:00.3 | that such an apparently almost identical group of proteins, the antibodies, could specifically |
... |
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