A tale of the monoclonal anti-CD20 antibodies, in tribute to prof. Wacław Szybalski (1921–2020)

Technical advances that lead to the era of targeted therapeutics demanded several milestones that were reached in the second half of the previous century. Professor Wacław Szybalski was the first one to perform a stable gene transfer in eukaryotic cells. To do so, he used his own designed system consisting of HPRT-deficient cells and HAT selective medium. Moreover, the first-ever hybridoma cells were also constructed by Wacław Szybalski’s team. These spectacular achievements made him not only a forerunner of gene therapy, but also became a foundation for immunotherapy, as hybridoma and their selection by the HPRT-HAT system turned into a crucial technical step during production of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). Herein, we present a story of anti-CD20 mAbs, one of the most successful lines of anticancer drugs. When looking back into history, the prototypic mAb rituximab was considered the biggest step forward in the therapy of B-cell malignancies. Nowadays, the second and third generations of anti-CD20 mAbs are approved in clinical use and numerous breakthrough studies on immune effector mechanisms were conducted with the aforementioned immunotherapeutics as a model.