Lock and Key antibody test

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By linking antibodies to certain diseases, a new method could uncover and confirm environmental triggers for diseases such as celiac and autism.

“We have two goals,” says professor Patrick Daugherty, a researcher with the department of chemical engineering and the Center for BioEngineering at University of California, Santa Barbara. “We want to identify diagnostic tests for diseases where there are no blood diagnostics . . . and we want to figure out what might have given rise to these diseases.”

“Every time you encounter a pathogen, you mount an immune response,” explains Daugherty. The response comes in the form of antibodies that are specific to the antigens—molecular, microbial, chemical—your body is resisting, and the formation of “memory cells” that are activated by subsequent encounters with the antigen.

To sort through perhaps tens of thousands of antibody molecules present in a person’s blood, the research team—including John T. Ballew from the Biomolecular Science and Engineering graduate program, now a postdoctoral associate with the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT—mixed a sample of a subject’s blood, which contains the antibody molecules, with a vast number of different peptides (about 10 billion).

“All the keys associate with their preferred lock,” says Daugherty. “The peptides that can bind to an antibody, do so.” The researchers then pull out the disease-bound pairs, in a process that progressively decreases the number of antibodies-peptide pairs that are most unique to a particular disease. Repeating the process with subsequent patients who may have the same symptoms, phenotypes, or genetic dispositions, continues to whittle down the size of the peptide pool.

The process may be used to gain insight on diseases that are thought to have environmental triggers, including Type-1 diabetes, autism, schizophrenia/bipolar disorder, Crohn’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and perhaps even Alzheimer’s disease.

http://www.futurity.org/lock-key-antibodies-may-lead-clear-diagnoses/