Journal of Immunological Techniques in Infectious Diseases

In 1975 George Kohler and Cesar Milstein, with a remarkable article on hybridoma technology published in Nature, opened a new era in biology with enormous implications for analysis in biomedicine and biotechnology. It remains unquestionably important nowadays and it is basically a multifaceted methodology including procedures for antigen preparation, immunization, somatic cell fusion and cloning, cryopreservation, immunochemical screening, functional and biochemical characterization and industrial scaling up. Over the years, some improvements in high efficiency monoclonal antibody generation and production have been achieved all over the world. In this review some contributions to this technology developed in Cuba from 1982 and 2000 are re-visited and updated. They include the use of tetrazolium salt as a physiological marker for plasmacytoma aptitude, the effectiveness of a stimulating growth supplement for hybridomas, the conception and design of precise supernatant screening and antibody class, and sub- class determination systems. Finally, an updating in some recent approaches demonstrates the validity of the hybridoma technology for the next generation of monoclonal antibodies.t