In 1974, Bottazzo et al. (
15) reported the presence of autoantibodies in sera of patients with diabetes and polyendocrine autoimmunity reacting with frozen sections of human pancreas. Although this assay is still used, it has been largely replaced by the measurement of autoantibodies reacting with defined islet autoantigens, in particular insulin, GAD65, IA-2, and ZnT8 (
4,
16–
18). The least reproducible (between laboratories) of the biochemical assays for islet autoantibodies has been the assay for IAA in DASP workshops. This is a particularly important assay in that IAA are often the first autoantibody to appear in prediabetic children followed from birth, and when they first appear they are already of high affinity (
1). Low-affinity IAA are less associated with progression to diabetes, and assays have been developed that use competition with a set concentration of unlabeled insulin to help identify lower risk IAA (
11).
There already exist both a GAD65 and IA-2 plate capture autoantibody ELISA assays that have performed well in DASP workshops (
4). Despite the importance of IAA no validated (in CDC-sponsored DASP workshops) nonradioactive assay is available. We believe we have solved the difficulty of developing a solid phase capture nonradioactive IAA assay using biotinylation of proinsulin (rather than using insulin as bait) and streptavidin rather than avidin for capture. Based on not using radioactivity and semiautomated high throughput assay format (although there is an added step for acid treatment of serum samples), the MSD-IAA assay should be suitable for general application. Acidification of serum is usually applied in assays to disassociate pre-existing bound complexes. Given lack of effect of charcoal absorption of free insulin on the MSD assay and the high concentration of unlabeled insulin required to inhibit MSD-IAA assay we do not believe endogenous insulin in serum is causing the inhibition of MSD-IAA signal. The mechanism of MSD-IAA signal inhibited by normal serum and released by acidification of serum is unknown at present, but it has been used in other MSD-based assays (
19–
21).
Perhaps the most striking finding of the current study is the markedly divergent results for the standard IAA radioassay and the new MSD-IAA assay comparing children expressing only IAA (at low risk of progression to diabetes) with those children expressing IAA and the other islet autoantibodies. It has been known for more than a decade that individuals expressing only a single islet autoantibody are at low risk, and for those relatives expressing only IAA from the Diabetes Prevention Trial study there was essentially no risk of progression to diabetes (0 of 407) (
22). One hypothesis for the very low risk of those with only a single islet autoantibody (e.g., insulin) is that spreading of autoimmunity to other autoantigens is needed to increase risk or marks a stage closer to overt diabetes. Our data are consistent with an alternative explanation for those with only IAA that it is likely related to prior studies of IAA affinity (
11). Namely, the IAA of those with isolated IAA is often qualitatively different from the IAA with other islet autoantibodies (of GAD65, ZnT8, and IA-2 autoantibodies). DAISY subjects were selected to be at increased risk for diabetes (first-degree relatives or general population children with high-risk HLA DR3 and/or DR4), and thus the majority of IAA
+ children had DR3 and/or DR4. We speculate that the mechanism of immunization may relate to expressing radioassay-positive, lower affinity MSD-IAA
− IAA. The simplest hypothesis would be that the lower risk IAA often result from immunization with a cross-reactive molecule, whereas higher affinity, higher risk IAA result from immunization with insulin/proinsulin itself. Although both forms of IAA can be competed with insulin and thus are not a biochemical false positive, in terms of biologic relevance those antibodies detected with only the radioassay appear to be predominantly false positives relative to predicting disease status. There is already data that insulin antibodies induced after subcutaneous human insulin therapy and the insulin autoimmune syndrome differ from prediabetic insulin autoantibodies (
23), and this study indicates that nonpredictive IAA can usually be distinguished by failure to give signal with the bivalent MSD-IAA assay. A caveat is that given long enough follow-up some individuals with only radioassay-positive IAA (perhaps as adults) may develop additional autoantibodies or progress to diabetes, and thus both longer follow-up and studies of additional populations with the described MSD-IAA assay are needed.