Anna Mazanova of the Palladin Institute of Biochemistry of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Ukraine has created a test to measure vitamin D levels in animals and humans. It’s comparable in quality to foreign tests but much cheaper. Today it’s being used for research on animals, but the inventors and their partners are aiming to start serial production of similar test systems and make them more accessible for patients.
Ask the average Ukrainian what they know about vitamin D and they’ll tell you the body produces it from exposure to sunlight. That’s true. Many have also heard that vitamin D deficiency can cause rickets in children. Older people (mostly women) with osteoporosis, a disease where the bones become fragile, take vitamin D supplements in combination with other medications.
“But many people don’t know that vitamin D is closely related to many other processes in our body,” says Anna Mazanova, a scientist at the Palladin Institute of Biochemistry of the NAS of Ukraine in Kyiv. “It affects immune processes that are important in the treatment of certain cancers and both types of diabetes.” In addition, vitamin D is especially important during pregnancy.
Anna’s colleagues at the Institute of Biochemistry have been studying the role of this vitamin for more than a decade. They have been using laboratory animals to model various diseases, such as diabetes, to study their mechanisms and better understand how to treat them.
This requires constant monitoring of the level of vitamin D in the experimental animals. Until recently, the Institute had been using test kits developed in Germany, the UK or the US. But they’re expensive and funding for Ukrainian scientific institutes is very low. Nobody in Ukraine makes similar test kits.
“I came to the Institute as a student in 2010 and my future supervisor suggested that I develop a vitamin D test that can be used for laboratory animals and then people,” explains Anna.
Anna went on to develop such a test and it formed the basis of her Ph.D. dissertation, which she defended last autumn at the age of 27.
The central element
Without going into details, the test consists of a set of reagents and a plastic tray with dividers. Blood serum is put in a compartment along with reagents. The level of vitamin D in the blood can be determined by the intensity of the color of the mixture. The most important component of the test kit is the special antibodies that “recognize” the vitamin molecule - and it’s the most expensive.
Antibodies are protein molecules humans and animals release in response to antigens – “foreign” substances that enter the body. There is a specific antibody for each antigen. Because vitamin D is a normal substance, the body does not produce antibodies. But there’s a way to trick the body into producing them.
Anna, for example, combined a vitamin molecule with a protein molecule from a species of mollusk and introduced these chimeric molecules into a rabbit’s body. After some time, she was able to isolate antibodies from the rabbit blood that could “recognize” vitamin D.
By adding imported reagents to this central element, Anna created a test for vitamin D. She says that its quality is comparable to foreign versions but is significantly cheaper because of the use of domestically produced antigens. Other researchers at the Institute of Biochemistry are using it and have no complaints about its quality. Several other scientific institutions have also taken an interest in using her test kit.
Closer to humans
But scientists aren’t the only ones interested in a vitamin D test. Vitamin D deficiency affects almost one billion people worldwide. The situation differs by region, while for many countries information is either unavailable or insufficient.
Anna says that doctors in the US recommend that everyone gets tested for vitamin D at least once in their life to assess health risks and get proper treatment for existing diseases. But nobody knows for sure what the situation is in Ukraine. State medical institutions don’t test for vitamin D because the imported tests are too expensive. Vitamin D tests are available at private laboratories, but not every Ukrainian can afford them.
Relatively inexpensive domestic tests like the one invented by Anna can remedy the situation. But it’s one thing to use the test on animals and another to start serial production for use in human medicine.
The test kit developed by Anna isn’t suitable for this because, as world practice has shown, getting a patent for rabbit antibodies is quite difficult. And in this case, it’s impossible, because the results of her work have already been published in scientific literature.
Therefore, Anna decided to create a similar test kit based on mouse antibodies, which are easier to patent. She received a grant from the Ministry of Science and Education of Ukraine and has partnered with DiaProph-Med, a Ukrainian company that specializes in developing diagnostic test kits.
“The antibodies we got from mice are suitable for some parameters, but not all,” says Anna about her results.
That’s why today she’s working on getting better quality antibodies and expects to complete her work in about half a year. If she’s successful, DiaProph-Med could start production of the vitamin D test kits.
