ABSTRACT
The hypothesis that autoimmunization results from disturbances in immunoregulation has, for almost a decade, been widely influential. The search for experimental support of this hypothesis has concentrated on functional assays of helper and suppressor T lymphocytes, and it has attracted considerable attention because immunoregulatory disturbances in a variety of autoimmune diseases have indeed been found. The application of hybridoma technology to studies of monoclonal autoantibodies is a relatively new research development, but in clinical medicine examples of spontaneous monoclonal autoantibodies have been known for over 25 years. The heterogeneous mixtures of autoantibodies present in serum have been subjected to immunochemical and functional analyses, and although these efforts have provided information on the nature of autoantibodies as a whole, technical limitations prevented an understanding of the molecular diversity of the autoantibody repertoire. Studies of spontaneously occurring monoclonal autoantibodies have provided abundant precedents for investigations of hybridoma-produced autoantibodies.
