Patent ID: 7332349

Claim:
A method for determining the presence of panel reactive antibodies in serum, said method comprising: providing a planar array of encoded microparticles of distinguishable types, wherein distinguishable types of microparticles display cell membrane fragments which originate from different cells or from different individuals and the cell membrane fragments present a known set of human leukocyte antigens (HLA) molecules; contacting said set of encoded microparticles with said serum under conditions permitting serum allo-antibodies to bind to HLA so as to form an HLA-antibody complex; removing serum and its components which do not bind to said HLA molecules; incubating, following said removal of serum, said set of microparticles with at least one labeling agent capable of binding to said HLA-antibody complexes; removing unbound labeling agent; detecting the presence of labeling agent that bound to HLA-antibody complexes on microparticles to determine the presence or absence of reactive allo-antibodies on said microparticles; decoding the labeled microparticles in order to determine the set of HLA molecules associated with said distinguishable microparticle types by correlating the position of microparticles bearing a labeling agent with microparticles bearing particular cell membrane fragments; and thereby determining the presence of microparticles in the array having reactive allo-antibodies.