Swine is a useful animal model for studying human health and diseases. Particularly, swine is currently preferred candidate species as the source animal for xenotransplantation. However, the usefulness of pig for biomedical research has been constrained by the lack of reagents targeting immune markers involved in tissue/organ rejection. The objectives of this proposal are to generate rabbit monoclonal antibodies to selected swine immune markers that are related to xenotransplantation and to characterize the produced antibodies to demonstrate their reactivity with the appropriate swine immune cell subsets. Successful production of these antibodies will generate useful tools to promote pre-clinical biomedical research especially xenotransplantation investigations.
