A newly published article in Nature Methods describes CDI Laboratories' participation in the NIH Protein Capture Reagents Program (PCRP).  CDI's patented method of antibody development (FastMAb) features the use of CDI's HuProt™ microarray (containing 81% of the human proteome) to ensure that the antibodies produced are truly mono-specific.

A number of recent articles and commentaries published in scientific journals detail the problems with antibody cross-reactivity, which impacts data relevancy and results in a significant amount of time and money wasted on poor antibodies. In addition, there is growing demand from the NIH regarding the need for antibody standardization, to ensure that reagents used in publications are actually detecting their intended targets.

Antibodies are among the most commonly employed biological research reagents, valued as tools used primarily to identify and/or isolate molecules of interest. It is also becoming clear that they are the cause of many problems regarding data interpretation, and may hinder researchers' abilities to reach unambiguous conclusions (Baker M. (2015) Reproducibility crisis: Blame it on the Antibodies. Nature 521: 274-276).  CDI's patented method helps to alleviate this reproducibility problem by producing antibodies that are truly specific to its intended target.  By first testing the candidate antibodies against most of the human proteome, only antibodies proven to be specific are then released through CDI's pipeline

CDI Vice President, Scott Paschke, said, "The fact that many antibodies used in life science research are less than monospecific is a huge problem. CDI has developed a very robust monoclonal antibody pipeline, using its protein microarray expertise, to help alleviate the problem of non-specific antibody binding."

As noted in the Nature Method's article: There are serious problems with the quality, consistency, and availability of research-grade antibodies. Globally, it is estimated that over $800 million is wasted annually because of the use of poor-quality antibodies.