What is the Importance of Luminex Assay in Early Drug Development?

The importance of the immunoassays for drug discovery and development is increasing day by day. Immunoassays are the sensitive assays used both for the pre-clinical and clinical stages of drug discovery and development. Such assays are employed in the evaluation of the drug response biomarkers, toxicity, and immunotherapy success. However, designing them is challenging as these are quite laborious to run, costly both with respect to time and sample input.

In recent years, the Luminex assay has become an important tool in cytokine detection and quantification because of its capacity to measure multiple different cytokines simultaneously in a single run of the assay with small sample size requirements. Thus, this technology enables patterns of numerous cytokines to be examined within and between experiments, which provides a more inclusive and comprehensive depiction of disease than measurement of individual cytokines—an approach that was not previously possible using conventional technologies such as ELISA.

The Luminex multiplexing technology helps in addressing the limitation of the numerous run assays. Multiple targets are evaluated within a single reaction by which the drug discovery scientists can effectively reduce the sample input and hands-on time required here. This approach is useful in the generation of comprehensive data for each of your analyte of interest.

Difference between ELISA and Luminex Multiplexing –

Enzyme-linked Immunosorbent Assay –

• One analyte approach
• Plate bound assay format with an ability to detect colour absorbance
• It requires a large sample volume – up to 50 microlitres
• ELISA sensitivity is detected in ng/ml
• You require more drugs for coating your plates

Luminex bead assays –

• Has a multiplexing capability of up to 500 analytes in a single run
• Shows a large dynamic range of less than or equal to 4.5 logs
• Luminex multiplexing assays are both customizable and automated
• The sensitivity of the Luminex multiplexing assay is measured in pg/ml
• Luminex multiplexing assays are 21 CFR compliant

Importance of the Luminex Multiplexing Assays in Other Research Areas:

Multiplexing assays are at first priority for the epidemic monitoring by health agencies across the globe. The combination of the PCR technology and other analytical methods along with the multiplexing assays have resulted in the improvement of the detection methods for co-infections, thereby reducing their cost and sample volumes.

Majorly, the Luminex bioplex assays are employed across the active research areas of asthma, allergy, autoimmunity, toxicology, and infectious disease. Extensive focus has been implemented in the testing the feasibility and affordability of the Luminex multiplex assays in the detection of the autoantibodies, autoantigens response of the IgE to grass and virus, tree pollen and bacterial serotypes as well as the weaponized microbial agents.

The researchers contributing towards the field of vaccine development and epidemiology have widely documented the applicability of the Luminex multiplex assays for identification of the targets. This target identification are carried out with the use of antibody-based capture or fragments of DNA that are specific to each bacterial or viral serotype.

Multiplex bead assays involve measurement of different potent analytes within a single well. Thus, cross-reactivity amongst different antigens and capture antibodies becomes evidently possible. It is important to test for the cross-reactivity of these antibodies first by using the lowest possible analyte quantity for minimizing such cross-reactivities.

Commercially available Luminex multiplex assay kits can help in the measurement of up to 60 cytokines, ligands, and chemokines. However, simultaneous measurement of the linear ranges of standard curves and sample limits are possible here.

Although the Luminex multiplex assays promises a wide array of potential advantages, both expertise and experience are pre-requisites for new assay developments which forms an undeniable part of the early drug discovery and development process.