Shining New Light On Pharmacokinetic Assays With Simple Western

An important aspect of therapeutic drug characterization is pharmacokinetic (PK) studies, which are used to understand the fate of an administered drug. Typically, PK studies are conducted to look at drug absorption, bioavailability, distribution, metabolism, and excretion. These studies historically have utilized ELISA-based methods to quantify the remaining levels of drug in a patient post-administration. However, given that biological drugs are quite complicated, and are known to change in response to stress, a one-dimensional test like ELISA may only provide limited information.

Instead, Simple Western™ from ProteinSimple, a Bio-Techne brand, is a capillary-based immunoassay that separates proteins based on Charge (i.e. isoelectric point) or Size (i.e. molecular weight) followed seamlessly by immunodetection directly in the capillary (think of an ELISA, but with protein separation by charge or size.

In this Application Note, we use Simple Western Charge and Size assays to evaluate the PK properties of adalimumab and two adalimumab biosimilars over the course of nine weeks in human serum.  Read how the Simple Western Charge assay provided the most wealth of information and was able to detect significant changes in the drug profiles over the course of the study, including the detection of unexpected stress-associated acidic peaks.