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.

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.