Brazilian Scientists Produce Antitoxin and Antivenom Treatments with xMAP® Technology Chris Haake
They have chosen xMAP® Technology to monitor the immune responses in horses before collecting serum to manufacture treatments
Of course, the process is not nearly as simple as waiting for the animal to produce antibody-rich serum. From the time the horses are immunized with a toxin or pathogen, scientists Milena Akamatsu and Paulo Lee Ho must closely monitor their equine patients’ immune responses. To do so, they have chosen xMAP Technology.
Scientists at Instituto Butantan in Brazil produce a great majority of the antivenom, antitoxin, and vaccine treatments in the country. They manufacture the 140 million flu shots offered annually by Brazil’s Ministry of Health, making the institute the largest producer of influenza vaccines in the southern hemisphere. While flu vaccines are common around the world, the institute’s other products are more specific to Brazil’s needs, such as antivenom treatments for snakes, scorpions, and spiders. Scientists there also produce antitoxins for diphtheria, tetanus, and botulinum, as well as an anti-rabies immunoglobulin.
Their team has incorporated a multiplex panel of 23 cytokines and chemokines for testing horse plasma collected at the time of immunization and again later as the immune system responds to the new threat. “We look for immunological markers associated with good response and bad response,” Akamatsu says.
“We can analyze several analytes at the same time from a small amount of sample” Each treatment can be adjusted slightly to optimize performance. “We are using new formulations for old antigens. We usually formulate with new adjuvant,” Ho says. “Then we want to know the kind of response the new adjuvant induces in this new formulation to see if the response is associated with better immunogenicity of the antigen.” Their team is constantly looking for ways to improve both the products they generate, and the methods they use, Akamatsu notes. While there are other techniques they could apply when monitoring the immunological response in horses, “We chose Luminex technology because it’s easier,” she adds. “We can analyze several analytes at the same time from a small amount of sample.” And while small sample volume is not as critical for horses, it makes a difference with mice and other small animals that produce limited serum.
xMAP Technology offers a flexible, scalable solution With xMAP Technology, scientists can query up to 500 protein or nucleic acid targets in a single reaction using very low sample volume. This low volume can allow flexibility for repeats, if needed. And by allowing users to run multiple samples at once, costs are reduced by minimizing the use of reagents.
Dr. Milena Akamatsu
Transforming serum into treatments through xMAP Technology Many of these treatments are based on serum produced from an animal’s natural immune response to toxins or venoms. At Instituto Butantan in Sao Paulo, scientists often work with horses—which are not only docile and easy to handle, but they’re large enough to produce significant volumes of serum that can be transformed into treatments.
At the institute, these features are essential as scientists seek to create a broad variety of antitoxin and antivenom treatments, in addition to their thriving vaccine production. Each treatment is different, and scientists must have a flexible, scalable solution that can be implemented as needed.
xMAP® INSIGHTS | Spring 2022 6
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