We're wondering if the above mentioned ELISA Kits are useful tools to detect cell death. Is there anyone with experience in this field or anyone who can tell us a good alternative?
You can just do a western blot and see if in your experimental conditions you have more caspase-3 versus pro-caspase. You can do this by using an antibody that recognizes both forms. This is an easy way to detect apoptosis and not so expensive as ELISA.
We really like the Cell Death Detection ELISA Plus from Roche. It allows you to measure necrosis vs. apoptosis (by sampling different supernatants) and measures cytoplasmic histone-associated DNA fragments (mono- and oligonucleosomes) after induction of cell death. It comes in a 96 well format, but you can break it up into multiple experiments if you have fewer samples with the provided microplate with individual lanes. This is good for both Caspase dependent and independent pathways.
As mentioned by others, you can also do western blots for apoptotic proteins. I think that having evidence of apoptosis by multiple assays is best - so I prefer to do both western and the cell death ELISA. When looking for antibodies for your western, there are many nice ones (particularly through Cell Signaling) that are for the CLEAVED protein (i.e.: Cleaved Caspase-3, Cleaved Caspase-7, Cleaved PARP) indicating that apoptosis is occurring. Cell Signaling's Cleaved Caspase-3 antibody is also very robust for immunofluorescence in addition to blotting.
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