A Measured Response

This need to measure immune response to infectious disease and related vaccines may be more pressing than ever, but it’s certainly not new. Since the 1970s, the workhorse technique used in most laboratories has been the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) – popular thanks to its efficiency and versatility. It can be conducted at high capacity, usually in 96-well plates, with results available within a day. ELISAs are also able to bind various analytes, which enables testing for different antigens as required.

However, widespread use of a tool does not qualify it as the ideal. ELISAs can only test for one immunoglobulin isotype or subtype for a single antigen at a time – yet modern immune analysis requires the interrogation of several parameters at once. Just imagine how limited the COVID-19 public health response would have been had scientists not been able to easily test for antibodies to three different proteins to distinguish between the immune response from a vaccine versus a natural infection. With ELISAs, a test must be run for each antibody isotype or subtype of each antigen, with a new biological sample every time – and that’s simply not feasible for the comprehensive immune response analysis required today.

More scientists have turned to a bead-based multiplexing technology that allows for comprehensive measurement of the immune response by testing for as many as 500 analytes – including antibodies, cytokines, chemokines, or nucleic acids – from a single sample. This approach allows for rapid results, generating information in just a few hours.