A Commentary on the Development and Validation of novel automatable assay for cholesterol efflux capacity

The determination of functionality or quality of HDL is assuming a central stage in the prediction of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). To assess HDL quality, several attempts have been made to develop an automated, cost-effective CEC system with few operational steps that might be used in clinical settings for large throughput testing. The work of Dr. Ohkawa and co-workers seems to address this issue and provide a solution for the same (Bioscience Reports (2023) 43 BSR20221519, https://doi.org/10.1042/BSR20221519). Earlier work from the author’s lab utilized a radioisotope and cell-free CEC assay known as the immobilized liposome-bound gel beads (ILGs) method. However, this assay required a centrifugation step to separate the cells and was not suitable for automation. To overcome these limitations, two very important changes were made (i) magnetic beads were used instead of gel beads which allowed them to avoid the centrifugation process that would allow ease of setting up an autonomous analyzer; (ii) porous magnetic beads were coated with liposomes containing fluorescently tagged cholesterol instead radiolabeled cholesterol. These two changes can be considered not only significant but also novel as they were highly suitable for CEC testing. The authors reported the successful development of a simple Immobilized liposome-based magnetic beads (ILM) automated system to measure CEC which provided both consistent performance and satisfactory correlation with the other methods.  Thus, we feel this study will open newer avenues for measuring the quality of HDL in addition to the quantity of HDL-cholesterol in clinical settings in a more robust way.