Orthogonal quantification of soluble inducible T-cell costimulator (ICOS) in healthy and diseased human serum

Inducible T-cell costimulator (ICOS), a homodimeric protein expressed on the surface of activated T-cells, is being investigated as a potential therapeutic target to treat various cancers. Recent studies have reported aberrant increases in the soluble form of ICOS (sICOS) in human serum in disease-state patients, primarily using commercial ELISA kits. However, results from our in-house immunoassay did not show these aberrant increases, leading us to speculate that commercial sICOS ELISAs may be prone to interference. We directly tested that hypothesis and found that one widely used commercial kit yields false-positives and is prone to human anti-mouse antibody interference. We then analyzed a panel of healthy, cancer, chronic hepatitis C virus, systemic lupus erythematosus, and diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis human serum using our in-house immunoassay and reported the measured sICOS concentrations in these populations. Since even well characterized immunoassay methods are prone to non-specific interference, we also developed a novel sICOS LC-MS/MS method to confirm the results. Using these orthogonal approaches, we show that sICOS is a low abundance soluble protein that cannot be measured above approximately 20 pg/mL in human serum.