Don't blame it all on antibodies - The need for exhaustive characterisation, appropriate handling, and addressing the issues that affect specificity

Recently there have been numerous very thought-provoking reports describing many issues relating to the overall quality of antibodies that are currently available. It appears that multiple major clinical and other analytical studies suffer from lack of reproducibility and this has been associated, to a significant degree, with the lack of specificity of the antibodies used and the lack of adequate controls/testing to ensure that non-specific binding to irrelevant antigens was not occurring. This appears to be a major issue and it is vital that it is addressed as a matter of urgency. However, not all of the problems can be ascribed to antibodies per se as inappropriate storage/handling/use in different analytical approaches and platforms are also of major significance. It was stated that antibodies need to be fully characterised with the entire sequence defined and published or available and this is now facilitated through the use of recombinant antibodies. This review critically evaluates these issues and suggests a way forward to address them.