Evaluating the Performance of Two Automated Anti-drug Antibodies Assays for Infliximab and Adalimumab Without Acid...

Monitoring anti-drug antibodies (ADAs) to infliximab and adalimumab is critical to treatment management in various autoimmune disorders. The growing need for proactive therapeutic monitoring further requires the detection of ADAs in the presence of measurable concentrations of infliximab or adalimumab. To provide robust analytical assays for clinical application, we evaluated two automated immunoassays developed using ImmunoCAP™ technology and based on the bridging format to measure serum ADAs to infliximab and adalimumab respectively. Without an acid-dissociation step, these research prototype assays can detect a positive control monoclonal ADA towards infliximab and adalimumab, ranging from < 25 ng/ml to 10,000 ng/mL. Both assays exhibit imprecision less than 20% at different ADA titer levels and can distinguish ADAs towards different drug targets. In method comparison using authentic patient samples, the quantitative results of the ADA assays are not directly comparable to two existing clinical immunoassays for ADAs (correlation coefficient r_s = 0.673 for infliximab ADAs; r_s = 0.510 for adalimumab ADAs), presumably due to the lack of commutable ADA standards and the polyclonal nature of ADAs. Nevertheless, there is qualitative agreement between the methods when evaluating putative positive and negative patient samples (overall agreement 0.83 for infliximab ADAs; 0.76 for adalimumab ADAs). Biotin and high levels of rheumatoid factors may interfere with the performance of the automated assays due to competitive binding with the biotinylated drug and non-specific formation of bridging complexes. The two ImmunoCAP assays can provide new analytical methods for proactive therapeutic monitoring of adalimumab and infliximab.