Plyclonal are easy to make by immunising a host animal while monoclonals need a sterile lab to merge splenocystes with cell lines that will never die and produce forever monoclonal antibodies mostly mouse splenocytes are used for production. The monoclonals are called clone and have their own name or number.
A student or post Doc may take home monoclonal cell lines in carbo ice and store them in a minus 85 freezer for weeks or liquid nirtrogen container called dewar. However the clone stays property of his employer most often a University or Governmnetal Institution.
The thief cannot sell the antibody producing cell line under the original name. A thrick used by monoclonal cell line thiefs is to give another clone name to the cell. Exacly the same cell lines are circulating under different clona name. QBEND10 CD35 stemm cell marker is an example of an cell line that is available under other names.
Monoclonal cell line theft in the USA, UK and Europe is costing 10 million of income loss to Universities, estimation 2022 made by Lieven Gevaert, Bio-ir. Gentaur BV.
Monoclonal cell line loss, intenianally when a project stops or accidentially by a bubble in the N2 container is estimated to 1 million USD of income loss to the owners.
Famous losses are the ULB HPV best monoclonal collection where the freezer was stopped intentionally whe the funding stopped. Unfortunately no monoclonal thiefs had copies of these unique cell lines.
Research of immunology includes immunoprecipitation, sandwich ELISA, Western blot, immunofluorescence (IF) microscopy, flow cytometry, receptor neutralization, and cell depletion.