The Immunogenicity of Biopharmaceuticals:
From horse serum to fusion proteins… and beyond

Carol Rosenthal • Director of Research and Development
Thomas W. McCloskey, Ph D • Associate Director, Cellular Immunology, ICON Central Laboratories, Farmingdale, New York

“Many investigators who make a new observation are like a man who finds a stone but carelessly throws it away without recognizing that it is a jewel. It is the prerogative only of a genius to keep the stone, and to polish it carefully until it is recognizable as a jewel.”

- Dr. Richard Wagner, who worked with Clemens von Pirquet in the Vienna Kinderklinik ¹

A century ago, the use of therapeutic horse serum for children with diphtheria or streptococcal infections was a last chance life-saving measure. Dr. Clemens von Pirquet noted that initial administration of the serum often made children sick while a second exposure resulted in a much accelerated reaction. In 1903, von Pirquet wrote a letter to the Academy of Sciences in Vienna describing serum sickness², a remarkable observation which described the first immune-mediated iatrogenic disease. Later in his career, von Pirquet introduced the term “allergy” and developed the immunological theory explaining its clinical manifestation.