Due to their unique properties, recombinant human monoclonal antibodies represent an important class of biological therapeutics. Over the past two decades, single B cell technologies have increasingly enabled the development of human monoclonal antibodies from individual B cells of immunized donors. In this doctoral dissertation, we aimed to utilize existing technologies and methods, improving, and adapting them to the equipment available in our laboratory. Blood samples were collected from donors vaccinated against hepatitis B virus on days 7 and 14 after a booster immunization when the presence of antigen-specific B cells is at its highest. The key optimization points in our procedure were selecting the appropriate technology for isolating specific, individual B cells, establishing an efficient RT-PCR protocol from single B cells, and developing a selection method for the specificity of the produced monoclonal antibodies. Cell sorting was found to be the most reliable method for isolating individual, specific B cells. An additional pre-enrichment step further improved the isolation efficiency. Despite using a smaller panel of surface markers (CD19, CD27, IgG, and HBsAg BCR) compared to previous studies, we successfully isolated HBsAg-specific plasmablasts and memory B cells. These specific cells accounted for 0.05-0.07 % of all B cells isolated from the peripheral blood of vaccinated donors. The most successful protocol for reverse transcription of mRNA variable gene segments utilized SuperScript IV reverse transcriptase with random oligonucleotides. Amplification of the reverse-transcribed products was most effective when following a protocol with degenerate primers and KAPA HiFi polymerase. By cloning the variable regions into vectors, we successfully generated 5 vectors with the variable region of the heavy chain, and 5 vectors with the variable region of the kappa light chain. After co-transfection of vector pairs into the HEK293T/17 cell line, 70% of the transfected cells produced recombinant antibodies at an average concentration of 4 μg/ml. We developed a specific HBsAg ELISA test, to verify the specificity of the produced antibodies, which showed the binding of three antibodies to HBsAg. We established a simple and efficient protocol for generating recombinant monoclonal antibodies from individual B cells isolated from the peripheral blood of immunized donors, using the hepatitis B model. Furthermore, the described protocol can be used to generate human monoclonal antibodies to any other antigen for basic research or personalized medicine applications.
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