Studying changes in cytokine expression may help scientists understand the roles of these proteins in human health and disease, and lead to advances in the diagnosis and treatment of inflammatory diseases, cancer, and AIDS. Researchers commonly quantify cytokines in biological samples with immunoassays, using matched antibody pairs for cytokine detection.
Keene, NH-based Schleicher & Schuell BioScience (S&S) now offers an alternative approach with its ProVision™ Human Cytokine Array (ProVision HCA), a protein array designed to screen biological samples for 16 different cytokines simultaneously. John Tonkinson, senior scientist at S&S, helped develop ProVision HCA, using the well-characterized stimulation of THP-1 cells with lipopolysaccharide as one model system. "The functional outcome obtained with ProVision HCA [that is,] increased intracellular levels of a number of cytokines, and secretion into the extracellular milieu of others, was exactly what we predicted based on the literature," says Tonkinson. "The only difference was that we were able ...
