The Only Good Antibodies community
Only Good Antibodies community
BETTER ANTIBODIES, BETTER SCIENCE, BETTER TREATMENTS Making best practices possible, easy, and rewarded.
Antibodies and the reproducibility crisis
Antibodies are one of the most important reagents used in biology and medical research. They are Y-shaped molecules that scientists use for their ability to recognise, and stick to, specific targets. They are used to identify which proteins are present in a biological specimen, and whether there is more or less of a given protein. This means they are used to work out which proteins might be important in disease. Data from antibody experiments informs drug design, and sometimes antibodies themselves are used as drugs.
Unfortunately, a large proportion of antibodies used for research purposes do not recognise the target they are meant to, or they also recognise lots of other targets. Two large studies suggests that this is a problem for more than half of available antibodies. This leads to waste of resources and failures of research projects and drug development.
The reasons for this problem are complex, but include that it has been historically slow, expensive and difficult to perform all the best quality control experiments. Companies are improving their internal processes, and new innovative ways to efficiently perform quality controls in collaboration are also showing promise (see YCharOS Inc. ). However, many researchers are not aware of the issue and do not find it easy to find the best antibodies, nor to perform the necessary quality control experiments. There is also a need to change the research environment and culture to address this problem.
Our Mission
The OGA community will work with all stakeholders to accelerate scientific and drug discovery research by:
1. Increasing the availability and use of good antibodies
2. Eliminating the use of poorly performing antibodies
Good antibodies (or affinity reagents) are potent and selective in the application of interest and display no lot-lot variability.
About us
The OGA community was established in April 2023 by a collaboration of biomedical and behavioural researchers from the University of Leicester . We are part of the wider movement to improve research integrity and reproducibility, we are an affiliate stakeholder in the UK Reproducibility Network. We are learning from this wider community, and our work also represents an opportunity for learning in the wider context of research reproducibility and integrity.
We are a diverse collaboration of basic, clinical, data and behavioural scientists and technicians from academia, industry, and non-profit organisations. We are actively engaging all stakeholders as part of our initiative including:
- Representatives of 32 UK universities that are part of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN)
- End users - researchers (that's us), including via UKRN Local Networks
- Research funding agencies including National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) , THE MICHAEL J FOX FOUNDATION FOR PARKINSON , Motor Neurone Disease (MND) Association
- Patient advocacy organisations European Pulmonary Fibrosis Federation (EU-PFF) , The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research , Motor Neurone Disease (MND) Association
- Experts in antibody production - Proteintech Group , Cell Signaling Technology (CST) , abcam , GeneTex, Inc. , Institute for Protein Innovation , Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank and Addgene
- Experts in antibody quality control - The Antibody Society , YCharOS Inc.
- Experts in drug development - AstraZeneca
- Research reagent database providers - SciCrunch Inc. , Biocompare , CiteAb , The Chemical Probes Portal
- Publishers and journals - eLife, Nature Protocols, F1000 , The Company of Biologists (and their 5 journals) and Wiley
If you support our mission goals, you are already part of our community! But we believe that to achieve our mission we should work together, and the OGA community and forum represents a way to help us collaborate better. We support open science and transparency, and we believe a no blame culture helps facilitate better collaboration and progress.
Together we will make best practices more feasible, easy, and rewarding. Message us and join the team!
Director at Aeonian Biotech Netherlands BV
6moThis is a great initiative fitting in nicely with our objectives. We have developed our Aeonian Rating® to aid the search of those few fit-for-purpose commercial antibodies amongst the overwhelming amount of offerings. The Rating helps avoiding testing identical products side-by-side (rebranding), cross-reactivity and purchase-to-purchase variations in performance. See https://aeonianbiotech.com/aeonian-rating-2/