Prestige Antibodies™—Monospecific Antibodies Designed for Immunohistochemical Analysis

Well-characterized antibodies are essential tools for protein studies, global proteomics analysis, as well as for clinical diagnostics. However, although production of antibodies is a well-established process and a large number of antibodies are commercially available through many vendors, specific antibodies still do not exist for the majority of human proteins. An underlying factor limiting the available antibody repertoire is that commercial production tends to focus on popular targets. The current needs of the proteomics community demand a far more global approach (Blow, Nature, Vol. 447, 2007, 741742; Editorial, Nature Methods, Vol. 1, 2007, 1-2). A second significant issue is the lack of a universally defined standard for antibody quality. This makes it difficult to compare antibodies of various sources without committing resources to using the antibody in its final application. Initial standardized testing for specificity and sensitivity followed by a thorough characterization would be of great interest to the end user, but this is a costly endeavor and most efficiently accomplished on a larger scale. At present, there are a handful of large-scale high-throughput antibody production efforts initiated around the world (Persson et al, Curr. Opin. Mol. Ther., Vol. 8, 2006, 185190). One such initiative is the Swedish Human Protein Atlas (HPA) program (Uhlén et al, Mol. Cell Proteomics, Vol. 4, 2005, 1920-1932). The aim of this program is to explore the entire human proteome using an antibody-based proteomics approach (Kampf et al, Clin. Proteomics, Vol.1, 2004, 285300; Uhlén and Pontén, Mol. Cell Proteomics, Vol. 4, 2005, 384-393). Specifically, the HPA program generates protein expression profiles of the non-redundant set of human proteins, presented as immunohistological images from the majority of human tissues. All images are annotated and made publicly available via an open access database, the Human Protein Atlas (www.proteinatlas.org). An ambitious and thorough quality-control process has been developed by which all antibodies have to pass a set of criteria prior to being tested by immunohistochemistry (IHC) and other methods (Hober and Uhlén, Curr. Opin. Biotech., Vol. 19, 2007, 1-6).