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The evolution of immunoassay diagnostics

An immunoassay is a test that exploits the binding reaction between an antigen and antibody to detect and measure specific substances in biological samples, such as blood and other bodily fluids. Used for a wide range of applications in both science and medicine, the test has several formats. Immunoassays are routinely used for clinical diagnostics, biopharmaceutical analysis, therapeutic drug monitoring, drug abuse testing, environmental monitoring and food safety testing.

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 Immunoassay Technologies: Past, Present, and Future

Immunoassay technologies take advantage of the body’s natural ability to detect bacteria, viruses, or other foreign substances (known as antigens) and simulate an immune response resulting in the production or secretion of antibodies (Ab) specific to that antigen. Antibodies are antigen-specific. An antibody’s binding site is so exclusive to the antigen it targets, that it is often compared to a lock and key relationship. By leveraging this relationship, immunoassay technologies use an antibody or an antigen to detect a molecule of interest, known as an analyte.

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Back to Basics: What is an Immunoassay?

In addition to microtiter plates, immunoassays are also configured as rapid tests, such as a home pregnancy test. Like microtiter plate assays, rapid tests use antibodies to react with antigens and can be developed as MoAb-PoAb sandwich formats, competitive inhibition formats, and antigen-down formats. With a rapid test, the antibody and antigen reagents are bound to porous membranes, which react with positive samples while channeling excess fluids to a non-reactive part of the membrane.

How Do Immunoassay Tests Work

Immunoassay Tests are biochemical tests that detect disease and works on the principle of antigen-antibody reaction. Immunoassay aims at measuring the presence and the concentration of an analyte. Researchers and health care professionals utilize immunoassay testing to detect different kinds of antibodies or proteins.

Immunoassay Methods and their Applications in Pharmaceutical Analysis: Basic Methodology and Recent Advances

Immunoassays are bioanalytical methods in which the quantitation of the analyte depends on the reaction of an antigen (analyte) and an antibody. Immunoassays have been widely used in many important areas of pharmaceutical analysis such as diagnosis of diseases, therapeutic drug monitoring, clinical pharmacokinetic and bioequivalence studies in drug discovery and pharmaceutical industries.

Immunoassays: A Guide

Immunoassays are biochemical tests used to detect the presence or concentration of a specific chemical, such as a toxin or hormone, in a solution using antibody-antigen reactions.

Principles of Immunoassays

Immunoassays are bioanalytical methods used to quantify substances by measuring the reaction between an antigen and an antibody. They primarily operate through a competitive binding process, where a fixed amount of labelled analyte competes with varying amounts of unlabelled sample analyte for a finite number of binding sites on a specific anti-analyte antibody.

The different areas of immunoassays

Be it for determining a Vitamin-D deficiency or the presence of COVID-19 or hiv in clinical specimens; there are immunoassays for measuring each of these specific biomarkers.

The evolution of the ELISA and other immunoassays

While there are many variations of immunoassays (such as ELISAs, radio-immunoassays, blood typing assays etc.), they all rely on two specific antibody functions, capture and detection. The first molecular evidence of these interactions occurred in the 1920s when Heidelberger and Avery demonstrated that antibodies were indeed proteins produced by cells and that they could be used to isolate their antigen out of a solution. This led to a rapid expansion of the field with the seminal work by Linus Pauling in the 1940s confirming the lock-and-key theory and showing the antibody-antigen interactions are more dependent on their shape rather than their specific chemistry.