Lanthanide polymer labels for multiplexed determination of biomarkers in human serum samples by means of size exclusion chromatography-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.

Lanthanide polymer-labelled antibodies were investigated to improve the analytical figures of merit of homogeneous immunoassays with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) detection for multiplexed biomarker analysis in human serum samples. Specific monoclonal antibodies against four cancer biomarkers (CEA, sErbB2, CA 15.3 and CA 125) were labelled with different polymer-based lanthanide group to increase the number of metal labels per binding site. After the immunoreaction of the biomarkers with the specific antibodies, antigen-antibody complexes were separated by size-exclusion chromatography followed by ICP-MS detection. The polymer label could be loaded with 30-times more atoms of the lanthanide that the lanthanide-DOTA complex traditionally used for this purpose elsewhere [1] which resulted in a 10-fold improvement in both sensitivity and detection limits. Analytical figures of merit obtained with the lanthanide polymer labelling strategy make the detection of the biomarkers feasible below the threshold reference values used in clinical analysis. This labelling method was successfully validated by analyzing a control human serum spiked with the four biomarkers at three different concentration levels. For all the biomarkers studied, the recovery values ranged from 95% to 110% whereas inter-assay and intra-assay precision were lower than 8%. Results obtained with this approach were equivalent to those obtained by heterogenous-based immunoassays based on the detection by electro-chemiluminescence or ELISA. However, the method developed offers better analytical figures of merit using a smaller amount of sample.