Assay development – natural review on drug discovery
Assay development is a procedure in molecular biology that investigates analysis, and test or measuring the drug activity in an organism or organic sample. A quantitative assay measures the amount of substance clearly in a sample.
It measures processes such as antigen capture, stem cell activity, enzyme activity, and competitive protein binding. The analytic can be a drug, biochemical substance, or stem cell in an organic sample of an organism.
The measured entity is called as analyte or target of the assay. In biochemical assays, bioassays and immune assays are the specialized varieties of assays in biochemical. The assay usually aims t measure the intensive property of the analyte and express in measurement units like molarity, density, and enzyme international units.
Key aspects of assay measurement
Regardless of a specific or particular molecule to be measured many fundamental factors must be considered before assay development. It is important to pay attention not only to the assay but also to the whole workflow and the sample preparation.
In assay development, it is essential to analysis the data quality and valid the type of assay to be developed. The key aspects of assay development are purely based on absorbance, fluorescence, radioactivity, and mass spectrometry.
The cell-based assay has the aim to mimic the cellular environment that increases the role in drug development. It is important to clearly emphasize the basic principle of assay development to build robust and reliable assay development that helps in generating meaningful data.
What parameter and molecule are to be measured?
Before starting the assay development, it is essential to know about the molecule, property, and parameter to be measured. In the case of protein, it is essential to check the key parameter of the amount of protein and its biological function.
It is also essential to measure the enzymatic activity on protein cellular targets and also essential to measure the mRNA gene-level expression. From this measurement and analysis, each assay generates different but complementary information about the molecule.
Source of the molecule
Once you started the assay development, it is important to consider the source of the molecule. First identify whether the assay molecule to be measured is a bodily fluid such as serum or urine, or a biopsy sample of a patient, or an organ obtained from a patient or animal.
Before proceeding with the measurement and experiment, it is most important to know about the source of the molecule. Perhaps source material must be post-mortem tissues. In that case, the source may be cells cultured in primary cells or vitro.
The sources of the molecule determine the sample quantity and determine the concentration and influence its stability. Henceforth in assay development source of the molecule have a significant influence o assay workflow that is developed ultimately.
Number of samples to be assayed
In assay development, once the source of the molecule is determined, next to consider is how many samples are to be assayed? In case of a handful of samples then a multi-step assay format can be adopted. It is important to simplify the streamline and automate the assay process.
Technology in Assay Development process
With the development of advanced technologies, the increase in the method of identifying and analyzing the sample may be simplified that in turn provides efficient results in assay development. A large number of instruments for label-free assays are frequently and commercially available. The screening is made easy with advanced technologies.
