[Establishment of a diagnostic system for allergic diseases aiming at personalized medicine--establishment of a novel ELISA system for SCCA].

It is known that IL-13, a Th2-type cytokine, is critical for the onset of bronchial asthma, and therefore, various anti-IL-13 antagonists are now being developed as reagents for treating asthma patients. However, there is no good way to select allergic patients into who such IL-13 antagonists should be administered. We previously found that squamous cell carcinoma antigens (SCCAs) 1 and 2 were IL-13-inducible gene products in bronchial epithelial cells and that serum SCCA level was elevated in the patients of bronchial asthma and atopic dermatitis. In this study, we tried to establish specific ELISA systems for SCCA1 and SCCA2. We generated several hybridoma clones secreting rat or mouse antibodies recognizing specifically SCCA1 or SCCA2, or both. By combining two among these antibodies, we found that the ELISA systems using rat anti-SCCA2 antibody (SS14B) as the coated antibody and rat-SCCA1 antibody (SS11G) or rat-SCCA2 antibody (SS8G) as the primary antibodies showed with high sensitivities specific recognition of SCCA1 and SCCA2, respectively. These results demonstrated that we could establish the specific ELISA system for SCCA1 and SCCA2. These specific ELISA systems for SCCA1 and SCCA2 are useful to analyze the correlation between serum SCCA level and the pathogenesis of allergic diseases and have a potential to apply to enforcement of the personalized medicine for allergic diseases.