Many of the most important proteins for understanding human disease exist at extremely low concentrations, often far below the detection limits of conventional immunoassays or mass spectrometry. These signaling proteins can read out early pathological states, subtle immune dysregulation, and treatment response or resistance – so missing them misses critical biology to inform drug development.
As a Certified Service Provider for Alamar Biosciences’ NULISA panels and assays, Sapient enables ultra-sensitive detection of hard-to-assay cytokines, chemokines, and neuroinflammatory mediators in biofluid samples.
The NULISA platform uses a proprietary sequential immunocomplex capture and release technique to improve the sensitivity of traditional proximity ligation assays by over a thousand-fold to attomolar levels – allowing for highly quantitative measures of low-abundance proteins that are not amenable to mass spectrometry measure.
Run on the ARGO™ HT System, housed on-site in Sapient’s lab, NULISA panels and assays enable ultra‑sensitive measurement of key cytokines and chemokines that are difficult to detect using other analytical tools. This precise quantification also allows us to cross‑validate proteins identified through our mass‑spectrometry–based discovery proteomics screenings.
Attomolar-level of detection (fg/ml)
Up to 12 logs of dynamic range
Flexible multiplex chemistry to quantify 1 or hundreds of targets in a single experiment
Contextualization of findings in DynamiQ™
Multi-omics integration with other omics workflows applied to the same samples
The result? Robust findings that can be rapidly strengthened with additional mechanistic evidence.
This Nature Communications paper demonstrates the exceptional performance of the NUcleic acid Linked Immuno-Sandwich Assay (NULISA™) in detecting biologically important low-abundance biomarkers.
As the only NULISA panel provider with a population-scale molecular-clinical database, Sapient offers the unique ability to both analyze your samples and validate the findings in independent real-world cohorts – as well as to layer additional omics data to orthogonally validate and extend discoveries.
Developed to cover 250+ biomarkers of inflammation and immune response, including with absolute quantitation.
For multiplexed analyses of 220+ biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease, including neuro-specific proteins.
Designed specifically for mouse and murine experiments, profiling 120 immune- and neurology-related proteins.
Low- and single-plex assays for absolute quantitation of key proteins implicated in neurodegenerative diseases.
Sapient enables you to validate what others can only hypothesize by analyzing your NULISA panel results within our large-scale reference dataset, DynamiQ.
This molecular-clinical database of >67,000 pre-characterized human plasma samples can be used to biologically contextualize your biomarker in independent cohorts and to build human-relevant evidence to confirm preclinical discoveries.
We can also integrate omics datasets – including from genomics, RNAseq, single-cell sequencing, and spatial profiling – to further improve mechanistic understanding.
Combining the measurement power of the NULISA platform with our team’s deep expertise in both optimizing these assays and interpreting the results, we are uniquely positioned to maximize the insights you gain from your study.
Conventional immunoassays like ELISA often lack the sensitivity to reliably detect the low-abundance cytokines and chemokines most relevant to early disease states, subtle immune dysregulation, and treatment response. The NULISA platform uses a proprietary sequential immunocomplex capture and release technique that improves sensitivity by over a thousand-fold compared to traditional proximity ligation assays — achieving attomolar-level detection (fg/mL) with up to 12 logs of dynamic range. This means proteins that are simply invisible to standard methods can be quantified accurately and reproducibly at scale.
Importantly, we also also able to integrate this cytokine data with other omics layers via proteomics, metabolomics, and lipidomics services that can support orthogonal validation and/or deeper contextualization of findings.
The right choice of assay depends on your biological questions, sample type, and whether you need broad exploratory coverage or precise low-plex quantitation. Our scientists are happy to help you select the most appropriate panel for your study goals.NULISA panels and assays are optimized for biofluid matrices including plasma, serum, and CSF – the primary matrices for measuring circulating cytokines, chemokines, and inflammatory mediators. The platform requires small sample volumes, and the NULISAseq Mouse Panel is specifically designed for murine samples from less than 25 μL of input.
Contact our team to discuss compatibility with your specific sample type.
Many of the signaling proteins most relevant to disease – including cytokines that read out early pathological states, immune activation, or treatment response – exist at concentrations far below the detection threshold of conventional assays. Missing these signals means missing critical biological information at exactly the moments that matter most in drug development. Ultra-sensitive, multiplexed cytokine profiling enables more confident patient stratification, earlier detection of pharmacodynamic response, and a richer view of immune biology without requiring large sample volumes or individual analyte assays.
Cytokines are important signaling molecules that drive and modulate immune and inflammatory responses, but they represent only one layer of a complex biological picture. Pairing NULISA-based cytokine profiling – which captures low-abundance immune mediators at attomolar sensitivity – with deep mass spectrometry-based proteomics provides a more complete view of both the upstream signals and the downstream functional consequences of inflammation.
A key advantage of combining these approaches is orthogonal validation: when a cytokine of interest identified through NULISA profiling is also detected and quantified independently via mass spectrometry, that convergent evidence substantially strengthens confidence in the finding before advancing it. Where the platforms overlap, they cross-check each other; where they diverge, they reveal biology the other would miss.
Critically, discovery proteomics is not constrained by a predefined target list. Unlike panel-based approaches that can only measure proteins they were designed to detect, mass spectrometry-based discovery proteomics profiles thousands of proteins simultaneously without prior selection. This means it can uncover novel effectors, receptor changes, pathway activators, or structural proteins that no existing cytokine panel would capture, but that may be central to the inflammatory mechanism under study.
Together, these layers can resolve disease heterogeneity, identify which inflammatory subtypes are driving pathology in individual patients, and point to more specific therapeutic targets than either approach alone. Sapient can run both workflows on the same samples and integrate the resulting datasets for comprehensive multi-omics mechanistic insight.
Sapient is a Certified Service Provider for Alamar Biosciences’ NULISA technology, meaning our team has been formally trained and validated on the NULISA platform and its associated ARGO™ HT System, which is housed on-site in our lab.
This certification reflects our deep expertise in assay execution, data quality, and interpretation – ensuring you receive the full performance benefits of the NULISA platform backed by Sapient’s scientific rigor and multi-omics integration capabilities.
Tap our deep expertise in assay development and NULISA technologies to obtain robust measures for difficult-to-assay cytokines, chemokines, and inflammatory mediators.
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