Qualification of a electrochemiluminescence assay for the detection of human urinary neurotrophin receptor p75.

The extracellular domain of the neurotrophin receptor p75 has been shown to be a prominent biomarker for both disease diagnosis and progression for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This urinary analyte may serve as a valuable fluid biomarker which greatly increases the ease of sample collection in both healthy volunteers and patients. In this paper, the method development and validation for an electrochemiluminescence assay is described. This assay completely uses commercially available reagents and can be performed using common lab equipment found in most bioanalytical labs. This method shows good accuracy and precision, high sensitivity as well as good parallelism illustrating the ability of the method to detect and report on urinary concentrations of neurotrophin receptor p75. The assay can quantitate as low as 78 pg/mL of neurotrophin receptor p75 and > 98% of healthy urine samples tested fell within the dynamic range of the assay.