What is the least amount of validation work that can be done to maintain an accuracy in antibody-based studies?

We recently had a chance to sit down with a few of the Antibody Engineering and Therapeutics speakers to get an inside look into what they're working on and insights into their work.  We start this interview series off with Dr. David Rimm, a Professor of Pathology and Director, Yale Pathology Tissue Services and Yale University School of Medicine.

Today, he starts of by answering the question:
What is the least work I can get away with but still have accuracy in antibody-based studies?

Dr. Rimm: In general, that depends on the application. Sometimes you can minimize your work by carefully scrutinizing the spec sheets that come with the antibodies. If the antibodies are validated in a very rigorous way, the spec sheets that come with the antibodies will share that information, including examples of progressively increased cell lines for either Western blots or immunohistochemistry or immunofluorescence or flow cytometry, whichever application you are looking to use the antibody in. So, the least work, I guess, is when the company does the most. You have to be the judge of that as you review their products, often in advance of purchase.

To follow up, we asked:
Is there any hope that I can get someone else to do this work?

Dr. Rimm: There is hope that someone can do it for you and that is the vendors. The vendors may do it for you if they are interested in having high-quality antibodies and if they are concerned about antibody validation. Again, some vendors are more
concerned about this than others.

The other way is to hope for some sort of certification. There is a group called: “The Global Biological Standards Initiative” – GBSI. They have convened a committee of interested scientists from biotech, pharma and academia to try to set up standards by which antibodies should be validated in an application-specific manner. The hope is that ultimately this organization – or some other related organizations – might be able to certify antibodies. You could perhaps envision a day where you could buy only certified antibodies and when you purchase a certified antibody that was properly stored, you wouldn’t need to do any validation at all.

Those events are still in the future. It’s not clear when that will happen, but I think there is hope that at some point we may be able to have less burden of antibody validation on the laboratory and more burden of laboratory validation on the vendor.

Dr. Rimm will be presenting Use and Abuse of Antibodies in Research and the Clinic on Tuesday, December 9.  For more information on this session and the rest of the program, download the agenda. As a reader of this blog, when you register to join us December 8-12, 2014, in Huntington Beach, California and mention code XD14172BLOGJP, you can save 20% off the standard rates.

Share this article with your social network, just click below to share now!

Share |

Should vendors validate antibodies before they are sold?

We recently had a chance to sit down with a few of the Antibody Engineering and Therapeutics speakers to get an inside look into what they're working on and insights into their work.  We start this interview series off with Dr. David Rimm, a Professor of Pathology and Director, Yale Pathology Tissue Services and Yale University School of Medicine.

Today, he starts of by answering the question:
What do we need to validate antibodies? Shouldn’t the vendors do this before they sell them?

Dr. Rimm: Well, in the best of all possible worlds perhaps they would. In fact, some vendors do very rigorous validation while other vendors validate almost not at all. So, if all vendors did very rigorous validation, we would not need to validate antibodies. We could just trust that what it said on the label and the spec sheet is actually what was going to happen in our research laboratories or in the clinical setting. But, unfortunately, that’s not the case. Since the vendor’s responsibility is really to their shareholders or their owners to generate revenue – not necessarily to make a biologically good product – some vendors pay a lot more attention to making the product good, whereas other vendors pay a lot more attention to making money.

And to follow, we asked:
Is validation the same for all applications?

No. This is a very important point. Validation is application specific. That is, validation for a Western blot or for an ELISA assay is very different than validation for immunohistochemistry or immunofluorescence. While validation may work across different applications, each application – because of the epitope or because of the antigen – may be in a different state in that application and requires its own methods and its own protocols for validation.

Dr. Rimm will be presenting Use and Abuse of Antibodies in Research and the Clinic on Tuesday, December 9.  For more information on this session and the rest of the program, download the agenda. As a reader of this blog, when you register to join us December 8-12, 2014, in Huntington Beach, California and mention code XD14172BLOGJP, you can save 20% off the standard rates.

Share this article with your social network, just click below to share now!

Share |

What is antibody validation?

We recently had a chance to sit down with a few of the Antibody Engineering and Therapeutics speakers to get an inside look into what they're working on and insights into their work.  We start this interview series off with Dr. David Rimm, a Professor of Pathology and Director, Yale Pathology Tissue Services and Yale University School of Medicine.

Today, he starts of by answering the question:
What is antibody validation?

Dr. Rimm's answer:

Antibody validation means different things to different people. Essentially, it means proving that the antibody received from the vendor – as constructed by one’s own lab – actually interacts or binds to the epitope that is allegedly to which the antibody was raised or to the epitope that is interacting with the antibody binding site.

The methods for validation are exactly how validation is done. It is variable and standardization would probably be helpful for determining exactly how validation is done. Some antibody validation is done very superficially and ultimately leads to false results or inaccurate results. While other people validate their antibody using much more extensive techniques, that’s what we discussed at the meeting and these results can be trusted.

Dr. Rimm will be presenting Use and Abuse of Antibodies in Research and the Clinic on Tuesday, December 9.  For more information on this session and the rest of the program, download the agenda. As a reader of this blog, when you register to join us December 8-12, 2014, in Huntington Beach, California and mention code XD14172BLOGJP, you can save 20% off the standard rates.

Share this article with your social network, just click below to share now!

Share |