Neutralising Antibodies against Ricin Toxin

Neutralising Antibodies against Ricin Toxin

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have listed the potential bioweapon ricin as a Category B Agent. Ricin is a so-called A/B toxin produced by plants and is one of the deadliest molecules known. It is easy to prepare and no curative treatment is available. An immunotherapeutic approach could be of interest to attenuate or neutralise the effects of the toxin. We sought to characteris...

Neutralizing Monoclonal Antibodies against Disparate Epitopes on Ricin Toxin’s Enzymatic Subunit Interfere with Intracellular Toxin Transport

Ricin is a member of the A-B family of bacterial and plant toxins that exploit retrograde trafficking to the Golgi apparatus and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) as a means to deliver their cytotoxic enzymatic subunits into the cytoplasm of mammalian cells. In this study we demonstrate that R70 and SyH7, two well-characterized monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) directed against distinct epitopes on the sur...

Thermostable ricin vaccine protects rhesus macaques against aerosolized ricin: Epitope-specific neutralizing antibodies correlate with protection.

Ricin toxin (RT) is the second most lethal toxin known; it has been designated by the CDC as a select agent. RT is made by the castor bean plant; an estimated 50,000 tons of RT are produced annually as a by-product of castor oil. RT has two subunits, a ribotoxic A chain (RTA) and galactose-binding B chain (RTB). RT binds to all mammalian cells and once internalized, a single RTA catalytically i...

Immunoglobulin A antibodies against ricin A and B subunits protect epithelial cells from ricin intoxication.

Epithelial cells of the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts are extremely vulnerable to the cytotoxic effects of ricin, a Shiga-like toxin with ribosome-inactivating properties. While mucosal immunity to ricin correlates with secretory immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibody levels in vivo, the potential of IgA to protect epithelial cells from ricin in vitro has not been examined due to the unavail...

Neutralising antibodies to the beta interferons.