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Why is there not an immune response to injected immunoglobulins?

Biology Asked on May 13, 2021

When you inject immunoglobulins as a treatment for certain diseases, the immunoglobulins are a foreign substance.

I can appreciate that maybe the constant region would be similar to the hosts as it is from another human and these don’t change a lot.

However, in the variable regions, wouldn’t there be the possibility that the antigen receptor region could be the complement to the patient’s own antibodies? Wouldn’t this trigger an immune response and destroy the injected Ig’s? Yet we seem to do this procedure, so why doesn’t this process occur?

One Answer

If a head-to-head "match" between antibodies from two different people was to occur, a similar match would most likely have occurred already in the donor. People have the same tissues after all.

But in the donor; the B lymphocytes producing the antibodies had to go through the processes of "central tolerance" and "peripheral tolerance".

This would weed out the cells producing autoantibodies.

Theoretically, nasty autoantibodies in the recipient could react with innocent antibodies in the donor though.

Answered by Polypipe Wrangler on May 13, 2021

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