This article shows the excellent sensitivity and precision of the SPEAR UltraDetect platform, demonstrated by two SPEAR UltraDetect™ assays targeting critical neurological biomarkers: Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein (GFAP) and Neurofilament-Light (NF-L).
These assays provide ultra-sensitivity with high precision, allowing for the reliable identification of subtle, clinically relevant changes that other ultra-sensitive platforms frequently miss due to their high variability.
With impressively low coefficients of variation (CVs) even at low concentrations, SPEAR establishes a new standard for analytical performance, making it an effective instrument for early identification and longitudinal investigation of neurological disorders.
Introduction
Accurate biomarker measurement, combining high sensitivity and precision, is critical for neurological research and therapeutic applications. Biomarkers like as GFAP, which indicates astrocytic activation, and NF-L, which reflects axonal damage, are present at low levels in the blood early in the disease and can rise gradually over time.1-3
Quantifying these indicators at very low levels in illnesses like Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, and stroke allows for better disease management and faster intervention.
This necessitates the detection of low-abundance biomarkers and their consistency and reproducibility across time and samples. The ability to identify disease-related alterations from assay variability requires high precision in biomarker measurements.
While conventional ultra-sensitive systems have enabled novel discoveries, they have always struggled with assay precision and variability, particularly in blood matrices, where neurobiomarker concentrations are often much lower than in CSF.
These constraints compromise the proper tracking of small but significant biomarker variations, which are critical for recognizing early disease signals, assessing therapy response, and tracking longitudinal disease development.
Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction (SPEAR) is a homogenous, ultrasensitive immunoassay method that addresses the sensitivity limitations and complexity of traditional immunoassays.
SPEAR uses a novel two-factor authentication approach to ensure that amplifiable signals are only created through prolonged co-localization of probes on target proteins.
It accurately measures protein biomarkers at attomolar concentrations with as little as 1 µl of diluted sample, outperforming the most sensitive heterogeneous platforms on the market.
SPEAR's homogeneous nature eliminates nonspecific binding associated with solid-phase capture, giving it higher specificity than heterogeneous immunoassay platforms. SPEAR's procedure eliminates error-prone wash phases, resulting in extremely high precision.
SPEAR UltraDetect™ assays, based on this core technology, provide unmatched sensitivity for measuring low-abundance biomarkers while maintaining high specificity and precision.
SPEAR UltraDetect reads data using standard qPCR tools, resulting in extremely consistent results across multiple qPCR platforms and formats. It is simple to integrate into existing laboratory settings and offers exceptional scalability.
This article provides results demonstrating the outstanding precision of the SPEAR UltraDetect GFAP and NF-L assays, 100 % detectability and quantifiability in healthy samples, and excellent agreement with the GFAP and NF-L tests on the widely used Simoa platform.
Want to keep reading? Download the full piece here
About Spear Bio
Spear Bio is an innovative leader in providing scalable solutions for ultra-sensitive protein biomarker measurements. Spear Bio’s proprietary technology, Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction (SPEAR), employs a unique 2-factor authentication mechanism to precisely measure protein biomarkers at attomolar level from sub-microliter sample volume. Spear Bio is focused on leveraging its technology’s unprecedented sensitivity to transform protein research and early disease diagnosis.
Sponsored Content Policy: News-Medical.net publishes articles and related content that may be derived from sources where we have existing commercial relationships, provided such content adds value to the core editorial ethos of News-Medical.net, which is to educate and inform site visitors interested in medical research, science, medical devices and treatments.