Protein analysis using Bio-Plex, IHC, ELISA, Western Blots or Flow Cytometry on tumors from in vitro or in vivo studies to analyse drug related effects, or on our comprehensive tumor repository (lysates or TMAs) to select tumors.

Link to other ONCOTEST assays :
Protein expression and activation/ phosphorylation analyses can be used for any of the 3 cytotoxicity assays (cell line monolayer assay, colony forming assay, in vivo studies), for tumor selection or for exploring drug-related effects during treatment.

• Native Tumor and Cell Line Protein Lysates: Preparation and Repository

Representative parts of four tumors are prepared for each lysate under frozen conditions using optimized buffers containing protease and phosphatase inhibitors. Our comprehensive repository comprises native lysates of most tumors, cell lines, as well as serum of tumor bearing mice. Lysates can be shipped or used at ONCOTEST to characterize tumors by Bio-Plex, ELISA or Western Blot.

A powerful system to quantitate numerous proteins simultaneously in a small sample volume of native protein lysates. The bead suspension assay (based on the Luminex Technology®) differs from ELISA in that the multiplex capture antibody is attached to a polystyrene bead whereas the ELISA capture antibody is attached to the microplate well. This enables different beads to be mixed and therefore multiple targets to be analyzed in one assay. The technique uses up to 100 different bead sets. Each bead set can be conjugated with a target-specific antibody and is internally labelled with different ratios of two spectrally distinct fluorophores to allow differentiation of one bead from another. Custom-made or commercial multiplex assays are suited to investigate the activation of complete signal transduction pathways (total and phospho-specific capture antibodies), protein family-related expression profiling (e.g. cytokines) or biological process-related protein profiling (e.g. angiogenesis).

Tissue Micro Arrays (TMA) allow the simultaneous immunohistochemical analysis of up to 150 tumors under the same conditions. They can be used for selecting suitable tumors before drug testing (see Example 1, overleaf) or for monitoring target expression during drug treatment (Example 2). All tumors of the ONCOTEST collection are represented on tumor entity-specific TMAs. Further information on the current array design is available on request. TMA slides can be shipped or analyzed by IHC at ONCOTEST.

Biomarkers can be analyzed quantitatively using standard ELISA kits.

Cell lines or single cell suspensions obtained from xenografts grown subcutaneously in nude mice can be analyzed for surface protein expression in a semi-quantitative manner by standard flow cytometry.
...more about our flow cytometry service