Acting and reacting in life science biotechnologies
On your journey to Biomarker profiling, you will reach the point where you need to quantify the proteins of interest identified along the way (eg. validation of semi-quantitative array results; biomarker discovery with an initial hunch on which pathway is involved).
At this stage, you will have narrowed down the number of targets you want to look at. However, the use of ELISAs is likely to be still too costly, too time consuming, and may require too much sample volume. [Read more…]
One of the recurrent questions that we get at the Biomarkers team at tebu-bio is on what controls should be included in a given experiment. Either if the experiment is done by researchers in their lab, or if we collect their samples and perform the analysis in our lab, a good design starts by using the most convenient controls.
One of the controls is related to the study itself. In this sense, definition of what a control population is, and how we want to study it vs. a cohort of patients has been discussed elsewhere in a proteomics post. Today, we will put our spotlight on the “technical” controls, i.e. those related to the technique itself. [Read more…]
As discussed in previous posts, use of new tools allows the finding of new disease-related biomarkers. Today, we want to put our spotlight on esophageal cancer.
A recent alliance between Quansys Biosciences and Allegheny Health Network has allowed the development of a novel 4-plex assay for use in the early diagnosis of esophageal cancer. Though esophageal cancer is rare, it often has deadly outcomes. [Read more…]
Pneumococcus, or scientifically speaking, Streptococcus pneumoniae, is a pathogen responsible for a number of illnesses, including pneumonia, ear infections, sinus infections, meningitis and bacteremia. Some of these illnesses can be life-threatening, and therefore, an early and accurate identification of the pathogen causing them is crucial.
Ayogly et al. have designed an innovative suspension bead-array experimental approach for studying in one assay both antigen-specific antibody reactivity and complement activation induced C3 deposition.
The benefits of such a scalable approach is based on its capacity to measure multiplex antigen-specific complement activation in the context of an autoimmune disease (ex. Rheumatoid Arthritis) and viral antigen detection (ex. Epstein-Barr virus encoded Nuclear Antigen-1 (EBNA-1)).
The combination of antibody reactivity profiling and induced complement activation in one assay open new perspectives in autoantibody- and virus-induced immune diseases.
Ayoglu B. et al. “Bead Arrays for Antibody and Complement Profiling Reveal Joint Contribution of Antibody Isotypes to C3 Deposition (5 May, 2014) PLoS ONE, CrossRef DOI Link to Publisher-Maintained copy: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0096403
Congratulations to the authors, who turned to tebu-bio’s range of products when selecting their antigens (ex. EBNA-1 protein) coupled to beads to determine the optimal assay conditions for measuring complement activation.