A portable optical-fibre-based surface plasmon resonance biosensor for the detection of therapeutic antibodies in human serum

Different lines of evidence indicate that monitoring the blood levels of therapeutic antibodies, characterized by high inter-individual variability, can help to optimize clinical decision making, improving patient outcomes and reducing costs with these expensive treatments. A surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based immunoassay has recently been shown to allow highly reliable and robust monitoring of serum concentrations of infliximab, with significant advantages over classical ELISA. The next level of advancement would be the availability of compact and transportable SPR devices suitable for easy, fast and cheap point-of-care analysis. Here we report the data obtained with recently developed, cost-effective, optical-fibre-based SPR sensors (SPR-POF), which allow the construction of a compact miniaturized system for remote sensing. We carried out an extensive characterization of infliximab binding to an anti-infliximab antibody immobilized on the SPR-POF sensor surface. The present proof-of-principle studies demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed SPR-POF platform for the specific detection of infliximab, in both buffer and human serum, and pave the way for further technological improvements.