Kinetic analysis of renin and its inhibitors by detecting double-labelled peptidic substrates with an immunoassay.

The proteolytic activity of renin is a key element in the regulation of blood pressure and a main target for inhibitor design. Currently, the activity of renin and its inhibitors is mainly analyzed using radioimmunoassays or FRET-substrates, which both have their limitations. Here, a novel kinetic assay is presented that combines the advantages of a homogeneous proteolytic reaction and a robust heterogeneous detection in a sandwich immunoassay format. The proteolysis in solution is not influenced by surface interactions and yields accurate kinetic values, while the specific detection of the cleavage products on a microtiter plate strongly reduces interference by concomitant substances and allows for a self-referenced signal readout. A new enzyme kinetic scheme for the inhibition of renin has been developed and validated by using the model inhibitor pepstatin. This kinetic analysis is amenable to parallelization for large-scale inhibitor screening. Furthermore, it can be easily adapted to inhibitors of other medically important proteases.