HYBRIDOMA FACILITY

The Hybridoma Facility aids Fox Chase investigators in the production of monoclonal anti-bodies to a wide variety of antigens. The facility provides information on mouse immunization protocols, fuses immunized mouse spleen cells with a drug-sensitive myeloma fusion partner, grows and isolates primary fusants, provides culture supernatants for antibody assays, clones desired hybridomas, provides large amounts of antibody-containing culture supernatants, and freezes representative cell samples for long-term viable storage in liquid nitrogen.

The hybridoma facility provides several levels of assistance:

• For those investigators who lack the facilities and/or experience required to make monoclonal antibodies, the facility will perform all the in vitro steps of the process. The user furnishes an immunized mouse and the facility returns supernatants for assay. Subsequently, hybridomas of interest can be expanded, cloned, and frozen for storage at the user's direction.
• For those investigators who can obtain hybridomas of the desired specificity, the facility will perform all the tissue culture required. This service is particularly valuable to occasional users, since many laboratories either lack equipment or do not have pre-screened fetal bovine serum readily at hand.
• For those investigators who are newly embarking on extensive and/or ambitious projects centered around monoclonal antibodies or hybridomas, the facility is able to supply advice, aliquots of pre-screened polyethylene glycol and fetal bovine serum, and fusion partners to enable these investigations to get underway rapidly.
• Production of high concentration (1-10 mg/ml) monoclonal antibody supernatants in vitro using an artificial capillary cell culture system. This technique provides an economical alternative to ascites production of monoclonal antibody in mice.
• Provide hybridoma growth medium and IL-6 containing medium supplement.

The facility also provides a controlled rate freezing device, large scale liquid nitrogen freezers, and a computerized record keeper for stored cell lines.

The following investigators have used this facility in the past year: A. Bellacosa, M. Bosma, A. Godwin, R. Hardy, K. Hayakawa, E. Jaffe, D. Kappes, A. Klein-Szanto, G. Kruh, W. Mason, B. Mintz, T. Poole, G. Rall, C. Seeger, A. Skalka, R. Strich, J. Testa, P. Tsichlis, L. Weiner, D. Wiest, T. Yen, and T. Yeung.

Illustrations or unpublished data in these reports should not be used without permission of the author.

Fox Chase Cancer Center

Scientific Report 1998