jessme, pardon me for the occasions of hyperbole, if not downright exageration. Maybe 95% of the scientific community doesn't know about anti-PS MABs. Most (the majority) probably have heard about monoclonal antibodies [MABs] if they were in medical school in the 1980s, but that leaves a huge number who graduated before all this has been worked out. It is difficulty enough for practicing oncologists to keep up with "standard of care" and some of the "protocols" which are available to their patients. We won't go into that tirade.
And while we're talking about exagerations, I retract what I wrote about "peer review," and pecuniary interests. I think most reviewers are honest and inquisitive. Not all are well informed on the subject being reviewed, but they will do some homework and "talk it around" to the experts.
You wrote that anti-PS has been around for decades. Probably forever, but that doesn't mean a scientist, say, interested in cancer genetics or stem cells, or traditional chemotherapy spin-offs, would have heard about Bavi or anti-PS MABs.
AntiPS,the antigen is the basis for the serological test for syphilis which dates to 1906, but I doubt if scientists then were calling the reactant anti-PS. According to Wiki, at about that same time, the turn of the 20th century, the idea of a "magic bullet" was proposed by Paul Ehrlich: that if a compound could be made that selectively targeted a disease-causing organism, then a toxin for that organism could be delivered along with the agent of selectivity. Voila, Bavi.
In the 1970s the B-cell cancer multiple myeloma was discovered to produce a pure, single type of antibody, a paraprotein, a monoclonal antibody, which stimulated study on the structure of antibodies, but it was not then possible to produce identical antibodies specific to a given antigen. Then a method was devised to produce monoclonal antibodies using human-mouse hybrid [genetic mosaic] cells [1973-75] which is the process used in a modified form to produce first generation MABs Avastin and Erbitux, and the process for which Köhler, Milstein, and Jerne shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984. So 1984 brought some focus on MABs. In 1988 Winter et.al. pioneered the techniques to humanize monoclonal antibodies, removing the reactions that many monoclonal antibodies caused in some patients.
The observation that PS underwent cell membrane eversion was probably made in the same decade, and the decade of the 90s saw reapid expansion in strategies to use the PS inversion observation to therapeutic advantage.
