Development of viper-venom antibodies in chicken egg yolk and assay of their antigen binding capacity

摘要

The therapeutic use of specific antibodies is invaluable in certain clinical conditions, such as administration of specific antivenom for snakebite envenomation. The production of antibodies and their purification from mammalian blood has been found low yielding and laborious. Most antivenom is polyvalent whole serum or partially purified immunoglobulin. The side effects of anti-snake-venom therapy include serum sickness and can be reduced by using mono-specific antivenom in sufficiently pure form. We have attempted to standardize a simple method for producing avian antivenom in relatively pure form from eggs. The isolation is very simple and involves only two steps, namely, removal of lipids from the diluted egg yolk followed by gel filtration. Each egg produces 80-100 mg of pure immunoglobulin, and specific antibodies are present for up to 100 days after immunization. Thus, large quantities of the Ig can be obtained in pure form using only small amounts of venom.