Validation immunogenicity assays

Development and Validation of Immunogenicity Assays for Preclinical and Clinical Studies... 

Because of the lack of adequately designed studies and standardized assays for many products the consequences of their immunogenicity is unclear. So assuming a product to be non-immunogenic based on literature is impossible. In other words, every new protein should be assumed to be immunogenic unless proved otherwise with a well-designed and validated assay strategy. 

A variety of assays have been designed and validated to measure specific antibodies in the sera of treated animals. In addition efforts have been paid to minimizing the immunogenicity of therapeutic proteins. As these issues are addressed comprehensively in another chapter of this volume, the focus here will be on predicting problems that may ensue from the presence of such antibodies, namely hypersensitivity reactions. Presumably because allergic reactions have long been considered to be nonreproducible in animal models, limited efforts have been paid to designing predictive animal models until recently. Unexpectedly, the consequence is that no adequately standardized and validated model is available at the present time. 

The objective of the experiments is to compare the affinity of wild-type antibody and wild-type immunogen (chicken lysozyme) with that of wild-type antibody and mutant antigen or with that of mutant antibody and wild-type immunogen. All the assays involve incubation of a constant concentration of one reactant with varying amounts of the complementary reactant, along with estimating the concentration of either bound or free reactant by an immunochemical or enzymatic method. In each case, the assumption is made that the measurement step does not disturb the equilibrium between antigen and antibody, and it is important that this assumption be validated experimentally. We summarize below several alternative methods. 

This chapter deals with the assessment of definitive and relative quantitative assays. A good reference on the analytical validation of a quasi-quantitative assay is a white paper on immunogenicity by Mire-Sluis et al. [6] and the guidance on assay development and validation for high-throughput screening developed by scientists from NIH and Eli Lilly Company [7]. 

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