Passive Immunotherapy of Cancer in Animals and Man

Recombinant polyclonal antibodies for cancer therapy

“…Attempts to treat cancer with polyclonal antibodies, in the form of anti-tumor sera, date back to the 1880s [Currie, 1972;Rosenberg and Terry, 1977]. Treatment of mice with allogeneic anti-tumor serum was shown to prevent development of a transplantable murine tumor [Gorer and Amos, 1956].…”

“…And treatment of mice with rabbit polyclonal IgG against murine endothelial cells induced apoptosis and inhibited the growth of tumors including murine melanoma and angiosarcoma and human colorectal carcinoma [Scappaticci et al, 2003]. Furthermore, occasional successful treatment of human malignancies, such as melanoma and renal cell carcinoma, with anti-tumor sera derived from experimental animals or from humans, has been reported [Currie, 1972;Rosenberg and Terry, 1977]. Finally, intravenous administration of human IgG, pooled from normal donors, was shown to inhibit growth and limit the spread of tumor cells in hematologic malignancies, presumably due to natural antitumor antibodies [Jonsson et al, 2000].…”

Characterization of a monoclonal antibody to L1210 leukaemia

“…Since they were identified (Prehn & Main, 1957;Klein et al, 1960;Old & Boyse, 1964), TAA have been regarded as a natural target for cancer immunotherapy. Yet immunotherapy through humoral or cellmediated manipulations has been so far ineffective (Rosenberg et al, 1977; Hawrylko, 1978; Motta, 1971). The failure of passive immunotherapy has been ascribed to the low immunogenicity (Hewitt et al, 1976) of TAA, fast shedding of antigen (Black, 1980), neutralizing antigens circulating in the blood (Nadler et al, 1980a) and antigenic modulation elicited by serum itself (Boyse et al, 1967;Stackpole et al, 1980).…”

Influence of C. parvum on the effectiveness of passive serotherapy in the control of the EL4 lymphoma in C57BL/6 mice

“…This work has shown that in a range of animal tumours, passively administered tumour-specific or tumourdirected antibodies can inhibit tumour growth. The effect, however, is generally modest, especially against established tumours (see Rosenberg & Terry, 1977) although it can at times be extended by the concomitant use of cytotoxic drugs Rubens et al, 1975;Reif et al, 1977). This limitation might be a reflection of inadequate levels of antibodies used in the experiments.…”