I'm translating a text that describes how an immunogenicity of a drug is measured by assaying the levels of binding antibodies to the drug. Or is it "against the drug"? I'm wondering how to name these antibodies. Let's say the drug is cetuximab, and I'm writing the title of a document section:
- Assay of binding antibodies against cetuximab in serum.
- Assay of binding antibodies to cetuximab in serum.
- Assay of anti-cetuximab binding antibodies in serum.
I googled for "binding antibodies to" and "binding antibodies against" and got only several dozen results for each of the two options. Therefore I came up with "anti-[name of the antigen] binding antibodies", but don't know how to google for it, hence my question here. Would option 3 look nice to a native speaker?
P.S. Alas, it is exactly "binding antibodies to" in my Russian text. I cannot omit the adjective "binding" before "antibodies"..
Связывающие антитела к цетуксимабу.
I quote from the Wikipedia page on neutralizing antibodies:
Most antibodies work by binding to an antigen, signaling to a white blood cell that this antigen has been targeted, after which the antigen is processed and consequently destroyed. The difference between neutralizing antibodies and binding antibodies is that neutralizing antibodies neutralize the biological effects of the antigen, while binding antibodies flag antigens.
My authors use the adjective "binding" to distinguish binding antibodies from neutralizing antibodies, just like in this paper, for instance: BAbs and NAbs. Another section in my document gives the results of an assay of NAbs against the same antigen.
Explanation of the difference between binding and neutralizing antibodies from the FDA:
(ADA: anti-drug antibodies)