Principles.
  Combined antibodies - better selectivity - novel specificities

    The pictures above and to the right show targets (e.g., cancer cells) with different kinds of tags on them where antibodies can bind if they match the tag in shape. To be exact, the match is complementary, yin-yang style. Two different antibodies which are combined in the correct way can pick out one particular target (bearing both kinds of tag) without interference from other antibodies or targets having only one of the tags. These cartoons are sufficient to illustrate the concept. The co-body chooses the target that bears both tags together: it selects for the desired target in a way that was not available until the antibodies were harnessed together in a team. This is a new specificity, unknown before.
      New words for new concepts: If two antibodies are linked together and work together in this way, we call that conspecificity. If the two are of different kinds, as in the pictures, we call that hetero-conspecificity. You won't find those words in the dictionary because they are NEW; we made them up. You read it first here.

    The moment of discovery
    Scientists think of themselves in terms of their research. Tom Boyde's had been on the function of enzymes (the proteins that run most things in life) and purification of biological molecules, but always wondering how biological molecules attach to each other in such a specific manner, which means that the right kinds bind and the wrong kinds don't. The process is selective; biological molecules choose their own cooperators and antagonists.
    So it is easy to see why the ideas described here should seem important. Professor Boyde recalls the moment.
    “At 6.30 pm on September 14th 1987 I was sitting quietly in my laboratory in Hong Kong, when a big question struck me like a thunderbolt, followed quickly by two more.
    1] How is it that a natural mixture of antibodies is so very selective, much more so than any one alone?
    2] Maybe two different antibodies become harnessed together as a team and act in unison, each grasping its distinct feature of the target with its own shape of claw?
    3] Could we do something like that artificially and create a new medical tool?
    I felt like Pasteur in 1848 realising that he had mirror-image crystals of d- and l-tartaric acid, or Crick and Watson in 1953 telling everyone in a Cambridge pub that they had found the Secret of Life. It took a day or two to work out what the exact molecular requirements might be, five years to make a good co-body, fifteen more years to get where we are now, develop the theory and wait for the world to understand. Not all discoveries are as taken up as quickly as the structure of DNA; some of us have to be patient."