‘Dear Scientist,
I read your paper and I have some bad news for you. Of the two antibodies you used, the first cannot be used for IHC and it gives false positive data by western blot. The other cannot be used for western or IHC either, as that antibody detects a conformational epitope that is destroyed by fixation.’
So begin dozens of letters to researchers informing them that faulty and unreliable antibodies had tainted their studies. But the full scale of the problem stretches far beyond a few dozen scrapped papers. A study published this May suggests that about half of published preclinical research produced each year is irreproducible1. Research points to antibodies as a major contributor to this ‘reproducibility crisis’.
Predominantly used to detect proteins, antibodies are an essential tool used in drug discovery, development and characterisation studies. Western blotting, immunohistochemistry (IHC), immunofluorescence (IF), immunoprecipitation (IP), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and more rely on antibody specificity to give qualitative and quantitative protein characterisation data. Unfortunately, this dependence on antibodies has become a major hindrance to progress in pharmaceutical R&D.
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