Microbial fermentation which is one form of Bioprocessing that has been around albeit unwittingly, for thousands of years, we have used it do brew beer, make wine, leaven bread and to pickle foods.

It wasn’t until around the middle of the 1800`s that we realised biochemical machinery was responsible for these products and we began to expand greatly the exploitation of microbial fermentation to give us even more useful products.

Today we have come to rely on the diverse manufacturing capabilities of microorganisms which occur naturally to give us anti-biotics, amino acids, the birth control pill, vitamins, pesticides and food processing aids.

DNA is used today with microbial fermentation to allow us to manufacture a wider range of bio-based products which have included human insulin, the hepatitis B vaccine, an enzyme used in the making of cheese and biodegradable plastics.

Monoclonal antibodies

Monoclonal antibody technology relies on immune system cells to make proteins called antibodies, we all know the importance of antibodies, they help to protect us from viruses.

However, antibodies are extremely complex in that while they might protect us from flu like virus one winter they cannot do anything to help protect against a slightly different strain the following winter. It is the specificity of antibodies that make them one of the most powerful diagnostic tools available to us.

Examples of how we use monoclonal antibodies are

• To locate environmental pollutants.
• The detection of harmful micro-organisms in food.
• Be able to detect cancer cells from normal cells.
• Make the diagnosis of infectious diseases in humans, plants and animals much more quickly and accurately than ever before.

Other than their value as detection tools monoclonal antibodies are able to provide us with very specific compounds, they are able to join to a toxin and they can deliver chemotherapy to cancer cells while avoiding healthy cells.

They are known to treat successfully organ transplant rejections and autoimmune diseases by specifically targeting the type of immune system cell responsible for the attacks, while leaving other branches of the immune system intact.