Making Antibodies as Ubiquitous as Aspirin

A longish history of serum therapy, with recent advances: Making Antibodies as Ubiquitous as Aspirin at Works in Progress 

Diphtheria, the strangling angel, was one of the great killers of children in the 19th century. The infection owes its lethality to a potent toxin released by the bacteria Corynebacterium diphtheriae. Diphtheria toxin destroys the heart, lungs, and liver. In the late stages of disease, the infected are suffocated by a buildup of dead, grey, tissue in their throats. Most victims were children under five; before modern treatments, as many as half of infected babies and toddlers died. There was little parents and doctors could do against the scourge, until biotechnology provided the first answer.

And 

But it was just in the past decade or so that the technology matured enough to give us multiple new approvals per year; the FDA only recently approved the 100th monoclonal antibody drug. To turn antibodies into a scalable technology, as we had done previously with small synthetic molecules, we needed to stack many improvements in manufacturing. With these advances, came synthetic processes that made far more diseases treatable.