Hello Franky. Have you already extracted tissues? Because if not, an alternative could be Immunohisochemistry (ICH), or Immunofluorescence (IF). But it is necessary to have fixed your tissue (usually embedded with paraffine) for slicing it (ICH and IF work with slides). Check also whether there are sellers who produce the antibodies for your proteins (as westernblotting, ICH and IF work with antibodies); as for western, you should be careful of species and to look for a proper second andibody.

Good Luck!

For caspases, IL1 and IL18, most antibodies will recognize both the pro and cleaved form of your protein. Even ELISA won't discriminate between them. If you want to quantify both, you'll have to do a western blot to separate the pro (high MW) and the cleaved (low MW). I cannot think of any other way in that case.

Unfortunately, immunohistochemistry won't let you differentiate between pro and cleaved forms, but could work for apoptotic factors.

As mentioned for IL-1b or Casp1 there isnt a good antibody that only detects the active fragments so ELISA is out of the question... When dealing with cell culture sometimes you can get away with looking at IL-1b secretion in the supernatant, however with tissue you cant.

You may have luck with something like a FLICA probe that uses YVAD-FMK coupled to a fluorescent probe to detect active casp1. I've used this successfully in macrophages with acetone fixation to look at casp1 activity by confocal microscopy, if you havent already extracted your protein then this might be an option. If you have extracted the protein, maybe get creative with a casp1 IP and subsequent FLICA hybridization, then read on a fluorescent plate reader (I have NO IDEA if this will work for the record).

I would just buy a WB system from Biorad, you will save yourself a lot of time and headaches by keeping to convention (Better yet ask around in your dept and see if anyone is willing to help). When you go to publish, reviewers will want to see WBs, there really isnt any replacement here.