Novel Immunoassay for Quantification of Brain Natriuretic Peptide and Its

BACKGROUND: Brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) is an un-stable molecule that can rapidly lose immunologic ac-tivity in blood. Conventional sandwich BNP immuno-assays use 2 antibodies specific to 2 different epitopes. Larger distances between epitopes are associated with a greater probability of proteolysis sites being located be-tween the antibody-binding sites, and thus such assays have an increased susceptibility to underdetect BNP because of the increased likelihood of proteolytic deg-radation. The purpose of our study was to develop a sandwich immunoassay for the precise quantification of BNP and BNP precursor (proBNP) in human blood that is not susceptible to proteolysis. METHODS: Mice were immunized with an immune complex consisting of monoclonal antibody (MAb