The Fundamental Flaws of Immunoassays and Potential Solutions Using Tandem Mass Spectrometry

By A. Hoofnagle, M. Wener. JIM - Journal of Immunological Methods, 2009

498 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Immunoassays have made it possible to measure dozens of individual proteins and other analytes in human samples for help in establishing the diagnosis and prognosis of disease. In too many cases the results of those measurements are misleading and can lead to unnecessary treatment or missed opportunities for therapeutic interventions. These cases stem from problems inherent to immunoassays performed with human samples, which include a lack of concordance across platforms, autoantibodies, anti-reagent antibodies, and the high-dose hook effect. Tandem mass spectrometry may represent a detection method capable of alleviating many of the flaws inherent to immunoassays. We review our understanding of the problems associated with immunoassays on human specimens and describe methodologies using tandem mass spectrometry that could solve some of those problems. We also provide a critical discussion of the potential pitfalls of novel mass spectrometric approaches in the clinical laboratory.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1430cf5c1fcbd8d37b63f4d874b7343854ebc4e7

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In Biomedical Engineering

Matthias Mann

In Spectroscopy

Citations in the corpus

Revisiting biomarker discovery by plasma proteomics (2017, background): “These include cross-reactivity, Molecular Systems Biology 13: 942 | 2017 ª 2017 The Authors interference by background molecules such as triglycerides, and non-linear response (“hook effect”) (Hoofnagle & Wener, 2009; Wild, 2013).”