Rekom Biotech issues a white paper on antigens titration

2/11/2012

Recently, ReKom Biotech has published a white paper concerning good practices for antigen titration. This may be seen as an old issue. However, from the point of view of a data analyst the approaches in the literature are not really convincing. Titration experiments should be designed to obtain the most information on how to use the antigen at the lowest cost, that is, with the lowest number of experiments. It should be noted that, while the antigen may be used for quantitative or qualitative analysis, the titration experiments should be designed differently in both cases. The published paper is focused on qualitative analysis since the main goal of the titration experiments in ReKom Biotech is to convince our customers of the high quality of our products. We have devoted considerable efforts to develop titration procedures to indicate the customers at which concentration the antigen best discriminates between positive and negative serum of a given disease. Existent and widely used procedures present several drawbacks. For instance, in most standard titration experiments, such as in Chequerboard Titration (CBT), one single positive and negative sera are employed. From a statistical point of view, this is not a good approach since results are very dependent on the specific sera chosen. On the other hand, when several positive and negative sera are included in the experiment, the results are not assessed with the adequate tools. For instance, we could not find a single paper which compared the outcomes of positive and negative sera with a simple test of significance. The white paper we have published is intended to show clients that we use well-grounded methods to measure the quality of our products, and also to give details on these methods.

"Tritation Experiments"

Written by Jose Camacho Páez.