SBIR TOPIC 107 MONOCLONAL ANTIBODIES FOR THE IMMUNE TARGETS OF SWINE

猪是研究人类健康和疾病的有用动物模型。其中，猪是目前作为异种移植来源动物的首选物种。然而，由于缺乏针对组织/器官排斥反应的免疫标记物的试剂，猪在生物医学研究中的有效性一直受到限制。该方案的目的是产生与异种移植相关的选定的猪免疫标志物的兔单抗，并对产生的抗体进行鉴定，以证明其与适当的猪免疫细胞亚群的反应性。这些抗体的成功生产将为促进临床前生物医学研究，特别是异种移植研究提供有用的工具。

Swine is a useful animal model for studying human health and diseases. Particularly, swine is currently preferred candidate species as the source animal for xenotransplantation. However, the usefulness of pig for biomedical research has been constrained by the lack of reagents targeting immune markers involved in tissue/organ rejection. The objectives of this proposal are to generate rabbit monoclonal antibodies to selected swine immune markers that are related to xenotransplantation and to characterize the produced antibodies to demonstrate their reactivity with the appropriate swine immune cell subsets. Successful production of these antibodies will generate useful tools to promote pre-clinical biomedical research especially xenotransplantation investigations.