Studying them has yielded important insights into reaction mechanisms, enzyme structure and function, catalysis, and the immune system itself.
[4] Enzymes function by lowering the activation energy of the transition state of a chemical reaction, thereby enabling the formation of an otherwise less-favorable molecular intermediate between the reactant(s) and the product(s).
[8] In 1994 Peter G. Schultz and Richard A. Lerner received the prestigious Wolf Prize in Chemistry for developing catalytic antibodies for many reactions and popularizing their study into a significant sub-field of enzymology.
[4] In a June 2008 issue of the journal Autoimmunity Review,[10][11] researchers S. Planque, Sudhir Paul, Ph.D., and Yasuhiro Nishiyama, Ph.D. of the University Of Texas Medical School at Houston announced that they have engineered an abzyme that degrades the superantigenic region of the gp120 CD4 binding site.
This is the one part of the HIV virus outer coating that does not change, because it is the attachment point to T lymphocytes, the key cell in cell-mediated immunity.