TITER ON CHIP: ALTERNATIVE TO SRID FOR INFLUENZA VACCINE POTENCY DETERMINATION

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There is a tremendous need for new analytical methods to enhance vaccine research and development, ultimately allowing the production of safe and efficacious vaccines in less time at less cost. For example, it is well known that for splt vaccines one step in the process that can be rate limiting is protein quantification and potency determination. The FDA approved "gold standard" potency assay for influenza hemagglutinin protein based vaccines is single radial immunodiffusion (SRID). SRID is a time and labor intensive assay, often requiring 2-3 days to complete and a minimum of 6 hours hands on time by well trained analysts. While the reference reagents are provided at no cost by the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), additional materials must be purchased and the entire assay prepared and validated by each vaccine producer. Often vaccine producers experience long delays, sometime months, in receiving reference reagents. Even with reference materials in hand, the wait for results can be days for each round of clone assessment prior to moving forward in development. As is widely acknowledged, the overall result is a time-consuming and inefficient vaccine development process. Here we propose two new quantitative, multiplexed analytical methods based on cost-effective low density microarrays. Both assays are based on a ¿Titer on Chip¿ approach that will streamline vaccine potency measurements by substantially reducing time to result, eliminating inter-laboratory variations associated with assay preparations, and reducing reagent cost. One proposed assay relies (Specific Aim I) on monoclonal antibodies that are universally responsive to hemagglutinin subtypes for influenza (e.g., H1, H3, H5). The other proposed assay (Specific Aim II) relies on universal sialic acid glycoproteins that bind hemagglutinin to achieve rapid HA protein quantification without the need for strain specific antibodies. We believe that Titer on Chip has the long term potential to revolutionize influenza vaccine potency determination.