A few scientists who have been burned by bad experiences with antibodies have begun to speak up. Rimm’s disappointment set him on a crusade to educate others by writing reviews, hosting web seminars and raising the problem in countless conference talks. He and others are calling for the creation of standards by which antibodies should be made, used and described. And some half a dozen grass-roots efforts have sprung up to provide better ways of assessing antibody quality. But it is too soon to call the cause a movement.“There are all these resources out there, but nobody uses them and many people aren’t even aware of them,” says Len Freedman, who heads the Global Biological Standards Institute, a non-profit group in Washington DC committed to improving biomedical research.“Most vendors have no incentive to change what’s going on right now, even though a lot of the antibody reagents suck.” BUYER BEWARE Take the example of Ioannis Prassas, a proteomics researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada. He and his colleagues had been chasing a protein called CUZD1, which they thought could be used to test whether someone has pancreatic cancer. They bought a protein-detection kit and wasted two years, $500,000 and thousands of patient samples before they realized that the antibody in the kit was recognizing a different cancer protein, CA125, and did not bind to CUZD1 at all2. In retrospect, Prassas says, a rush to get going on a promising hypothesis meant that he and his group had failed to do all the right tests.“If someone says,‘Here is an assay you can use,’you are so eager to test it you can forget that what has been promised is not the case.” Most scientists who purchase antibodies believe the label printed on the vial, says Rimm.“As a pathologist, I wasn’t trained that you had to validate antibodies; I was just trained that you ordered them.” Antibodies are produced by the immune systems of most vertebrates to target an invader such as a bacterium. Since the 1970s, scientists have exploited antibodies for research. If a researcher injects a protein of interest into a rabbit, white blood cells known as B cells will start producing antibodies against the protein, which can be collected from the animal’s blood. For a more consistent product, the B cells can be retrieved, fused with an ‘immortalized’cell and cultured to provide a theoretically unlimited supply.