Kohler, Georges Jean Franz (1946-1995), was a German biochemist who helped produce the first monoclonal antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies are laboratory versions of the antibodies produced naturally by the immune system when foreign substances, such as bacteria and viruses, invade the body.
Kohler and Argentine-born scientist Cesar Milstein developed a laboratory technique to produce monoclonal antibodies in 1975. Their technique enabled scientists to custom-design antibodies to attack specific infectious agents and to produce identical copies of those antibodies in large quantities. Monoclonal antibodies can be used to study immunity or to diagnose and treat disease. For their achievement, the two scientists shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with British and Danish immunology researcher Niels K. Jerne.
Kohler was born in Munich, in what was then West Germany, and received a Ph.D. degree in biology from the University of Freiburg in 1974. From 1974 to 1976, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he and Milstein produced the first monoclonal antibodies. Kohler did research at the Basel Institute of Immunology in Switzerland from 1976 to 1983. In 1984, he became director of the Max Planck Institute for Immune Biology in Freiburg.
See also Monoclonal antibody .
