Veterinary Applications of AMH
The automated AMH assays using the Brookes antibodies are now a major tool in human clinical medicine. They could also be a useful tool in veterinary medicine.
Of course, all mammals have similar biology and AMH is important in animals as a measure of ovarian reserve.
When the Brookes monoclonal antibodies to AMH were made in 2004 it was a priority that the assay worked on both human AMH for clinical studies and on mouse AMH for research on AMH. As a result of the immunization and screening procedures used at Brookes University,the old DSL and Beckman Gen II AMH ELISAs, using the Brookes antibodies, found applicability to many animal species.
Now the Oxford Brookes antibodies are used on 4 fully automated AMH assay platforms -Roche Elecsys, Beckman Access, Siemens *(Attelica and Centaur) and Fujirebio Lumipulse platforms for human AMH clinical assays.
Although none of these companies promotes their assays for veterinary work, researchers around the world are realising that they can benefit from the high quality performance of the Roche Elecsys fully automated AMH assay in their work on animals.
The following lists some publications using the Roche AMH assay in the following species.
1. Camel
2. Cat
3. Cow
4. Dog
5. Horse
6. Mouse
7. Rabbit
8. Sheep
The Roche AMH assay is fully automated and takes 20 minutes. There are laboratories running the Roche AMH assay in most major cities and in many IVF clinics and it would give veterinary labs a chance to run small numbers of samples occasionally without the problems of training staff to run manual ELISAs and of having to delay testing until there were enough to run an ELISA assay.
1. | It it likely that the Roche AMH assay would give usable results on many other mammalian species. |
2. | It is certain that the assays using the Brookes antibodies work on animal samples through immunological cross-reaction between the AMH from different species rather than full reactivity as with human AMH. Purified AMH from each species is not available to check this exactly. |
3. | For most veterinary applications, knowing the exact AMH concentration is less important than having enough information for it to be useful in routine practice. |
4. | Since the above 4 automated assays all use the same antibodies it is probably all would be similarly useful in animals. |
5. | When applying the assay to a new species for the first time, and in routine use, it is useful for the lab to have an in house QC pool of serum from that species to run as controls in each assay. |
6. | Dilution testing can be done by making dilutions in serum from ovariectomised or castrate serum which should have minimal signal when tested alone. Many labs have done their own in house validations for the species of interest. |
Currently the assays in use for animal AMH are many different manual ELISAs where the source or history of the antibodies used are not always clear, and where different results will be found when running samples with kits from different sources. This can make it difficult for research to guide practical use and for labs to know what results to expect if the assay they use is different to that used in the primary research.
AMH ELISA kits are often labelled, cat, sheep, horse etc giving the impression that AMH from the named species was used as an immunogen and recombinant AMH from that species used as the calibrator. This is rarely, if ever, the case.
The more veterinary work gets transferred to automated assays the better as these remove the need for operator skill in running manual tests and allow the veterinary user to benefit from the high standards of manufacture of assays for human clinical use
It would greatly facilitate future veterinary research and routine if many different labs used the same fully automated assay platform.
For human clinical work the Roche, Beckman, Fujirebio and Siemens all give similar results.on human serum. It is likely to be true for animal work to but the animal work so far seems only to have used the Roche Elecsys assay.
It has to be seen as a positive development that all the research studies below all used exactly the same assay for their work on different animal species as is in widespread use around the world in hospitals and IVF clinics.
Camel
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37778186 Theriogenology, 2023 vol. 200 pp. 106-113
Cat
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36495634 Domest Anim Endocrinol, 2022 vol. 81 p. 106749
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35834880 J Feline Med Surg, 2022 vol. 24(8) e168-e174
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35347540 JFMS Open Rep, 2017 vol. 3(2) p. 2055116917722701
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28839946 Theriogenology, 2019 vol. 127 pp. 114-119 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35347540
Cow
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38889090 Reprod Domest Anim, 2024 vol. 59(2) e14542
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38366707 Reprod Domest Anim, 2023 vol. 58(12) pp. 1695-1701
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37786956 BMC Vet Res, 2023 vol. 19(1) p. 140
Dog
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29603438 Reprod Domest Anim, 2022 vol. 57(12) pp. 1636-1643
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38237213
Horse
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34359132 Animals (Basel), 2021 vol. 11(7) p. 2004
Rabbit
URL – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36052807 Reprod Domest Anim, 2024 vol. 59(8) e14692