Reshaping human antibodies: grafting an antilysozyme activity.

The production of therapeutic human monoclonal antibodies by hybridoma technology has proved difficult, and this has prompted the "humanizing" of mouse monoclonal antibodies by recombinant DNA techniques. It was shown previously that the binding site for a small hapten could be grafted from the heavy-chain variable domain of a mouse antibody to that of a human myeloma protein by transplanting the hypervariable loops. It is now shown that a large binding site for a protein antigen (lysozyme) can also be transplanted from mouse to human heavy chain. The success of such constructions may be facilitated by an induced-fit mechanism.