The research paper published in the scientific journal Nature explains the rapid production technique which could have a significant impact on the effectiveness of organisations responses to disease outbreaks.

Governments have been keen to establish rapid response protocols in case of pandemics, and this production method has the potential to greatly enhance their effectiveness.

Patrick Wilson, of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, said: "With just a few tablespoons of blood, we can now rapidly generate human monoclonal antibodies that potentially could be used for diagnosis and treatment of newly emerging strains of influenza.

"In the face of a disease outbreak, the ability to produce infection-fighting human mAbs swiftly would be invaluable."

Bird flu is the obvious concern with regards to future outbreaks and the research team plan to test their techniques effectiveness at producing mAbs against H5N1.

This appears to be the next logical step in the research programme which set out to improve mAbs production methods.

The researchers sought to use antibody-secreting plasma cells (ASCs), a subset of immune system cells, as a source of mAbs.

ASCs act as the bodies' rapid response mechanism, producing a lot of antibodies in a short space of time before ceasing activity shortly afterwards. In the study production peaked at one week and was virtually nonexistent after two.

The ASCs were harvested during their brief flurry of activity. Instead of the time consuming process of replicating these cells the researchers extracted the genes responsible for antibody production and inserted them into existing B-cell lines.

By having a ready made antibody production line to insert the gene into the speed of vaccine production was increased.

Beyond this the team believes the technique has potential in the production of mAbs to combat anthrax, respiratory syncytial virus and pneumococcal pneumonia.

Speaking to in-PharmaTechnologist.com Patrick Wilson said: "We are currently producing antibodies to each of these, but most in the context of scientific studies rather than just to generate antibodies.

"Though we hope the reagents are commercialised and certainly realise that this is likely the only way to get them to the masses, our work is still ultimately driven by scientific questions. Keep your fingers crossed that we can treat some diseases!"