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Kristin A Hogquist, OKT3 and H57-597: From Discovery, to Commercialization, to the Clinic, The Journal of Immunology, Volume 197, Issue 9, November 2016, Pages 3429–3430, https://doi.org/10.4049/jimmunol.1601599
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Monoclonal Abs to major components of the immune system are completely taken for granted now; however, at the time of their initial development, they opened broad new vistas on immune biology. The two papers featured in this installment of Pillars of Immunology, published in 1980 and 1989, describe Abs to the human and mouse TCR, respectively. They are among the most highly cited papers in the 100-year history of The Journal of Immunology. It is interesting to consider the impact that these papers made at the time, as well as how they continue to impact the field.
The article by Van Wauwe et al. (1) from 1980 does not actually report the generation of the OKT3 mAb to human CD3. The creation of OKT3 (and other now-famous anti-human T cell Abs, such as OKT4 that binds to CD4) was reported earlier by Goldstein, Schlossman, and colleagues (2). Rather, the featured article establishes that the OKT3 Ab drives T cell proliferation through TCR cross-linking. In the late 1970s, B cell hybridoma technology was relatively new (3), and Abs of functional interest were often published before their precise specificity was fully understood. This article was a breakthrough because it represented a means to definitively identify human T cells from other blood mononuclear cells and a means to induce human T cell proliferation in vitro.
