We know that from the earliest possible stages in your development programs, you need confidence that your antibodies are specific and sensitive for your target-dependent needs. Dr Caroline Hirst, Senior Scientist at Abcam, knows all too well the importance of having confidence in your antibody clone. With 15 years of experience in working in academia and Biopharma, she saw firsthand how crucial progress can be lost when antibodies don't perform as expected.

"Performing your own validation assays can take up valuable time that could be spent making progress. It's so important to know for sure that your antibody is sensitive and specific to your target antigen so you can trust your results. By handling the validation work ourselves, we significantly reduce the effort required from our customers."

Dr Caroline Hirst

Our enhanced validation gives you an extra level of confidence in an antibody clone, providing additional data on the specificity and sensitivity of our recombinant antibodies in IHC and other relevant techniques. The validation is carried out in a custom manner, so the data generated is specific to both the target and the relevant research and clinical settings. Recombinant antibodies are profiled with extensive specificity and sensitivity testing on hundreds of individual relevant disease cases. This rigorous validation process ensures that our antibodies deliver reliable and precise results, significantly de-risking the challenge of clone selection.

"The large number of representative samples means we can demonstrate antibody sensitivity across expression profiles in real patient populations. You can have confidence that your biomarkers are detectable and represent what's really happening in patient populations."

Unmatched antibody profiling

Our IHC standard validation uses in-house tissue microarrays (TMAs) comprising 16 human normal and 16 human cancer tissues in duplicate as well as TMAs of normal mouse and rat tissue. Our enhanced validation program goes above and beyond, validating some of our best recombinant antibodies in a vastly increased number of cancer tissue cases and assays. Up to 400 tissue cases are used to generate an antibody expression profile with an unprecedented level of detail, evaluating antibody performance across different tissues, patient populations, and disease states. Our datasets provide you with thoroughly optimized protocols for IHC automated platforms like BOND RX and DISCOVERY ULTRA, so you can have unmatched confidence that our antibodies will work in your lab.

Tailored specificity assays

We know your research needs are unique, so we develop bespoke assays as part of our enhanced validation protocols. To test specificity as stringently as possible, we validate our antibodies in knock-out cell lines. Where relevant, we use chromogenic multiplex assays which inform about the spatial context of multiple biologically relevant targets, including co-expression of targets in the same cell.

"It can be really time-consuming to optimize chromogenic multiplex assays, so we're pleased to include fully optimized protocols in our enhanced validation data packs"

Peptide assays have been used to demonstrate that antibodies don’t cross-react with antigens of different protein isoforms, and over-expressing cell lines are used to show the antibody doesn’t cross-react with family members.

Blending traditional expertise and cutting-edge technology

Our enhanced validation protocols result in comprehensive validation data that encompasses relevant research and clinical settings for the target in question. Our data packs provide a broad range of carefully selected representative images, offering a detailed view of antibody performance across different disease settings. Our meticulously chosen pathology analysis methodology analyzes target staining intensity using a combination of both manual pathology scoring and digital whole-core analysis, leveraging AI-driven precision tissue analysis software. AI integration is exclusive to our enhanced validation program.

Our enhanced validation program is only growing in scope, and we’re excited to add to our library of data packs. Find out more about the data we provide, get reagents you can trust, and move your research forward.