Antibody-dependent, cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC) reporter assays are used to assess the efficacy of monoclonal antibody therapies. Although such therapies are popular, particularly to treat cancer and autoimmune disorders, “no one is happy with the current assays,” says Jey Cheng, a senior research scientist at Promega.
The bottleneck, she says, has been the variability of the human donor immune cells used as effector cells, which recognize an antibody on a target cell, such as a tumor cell, and attack it. Testing the same antibody therapy on different days, Cheng says, “it’s hard to get a repeatable result.”
To develop an assay that is more reliable, Cheng’s team diverged from the usual laborious protocol of culturing cells obtained from human donors. Instead, Promega’s new ADCC Reporter Bioassay kit includes engineered human T cells developed from an immortalized cell line as effector cells, ready to thaw and use. The result is an assay that is “robust, convenient, and easy to perform,” says Mary Hu, the director of Bioassay Development and Process Analytics at Seattle Genetics.
The kit costs $800 and was introduced to the market in November 2012. The major limitation of the assay is that it needs to be optimized to target the appropriate cells, “in addition to optimizing the ratio of effector cells versus target cells,” says Hu. One big benefit, she adds, is that unlike assays that use human donor cells, which can take days to propagate, all the work to assess ADCC using Promega’s kit can be done in a single day.
MARDIS: This system is very innovative and likely will improve the development of these much-needed [antibody-based] drugs, which is going to be critically important.
MUKHOPADHYAY: Allows investigation into presence of . . . an adaptive immune response mechanism for many commercially available oncology therapeutics, including Rituxan and Herceptin.
MARDIS: This system is very innovative and likely will improve the development of these much-needed [antibody-based] drugs, which is going to be critically important.
MUKHOPADHYAY: Allows investigation into presence of . . . an adaptive immune response mechanism for many commercially available oncology therapeutics, including Rituxan and Herceptin.
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