Lateral Flow Immunoassay Reader: The Bane Of Infectious Diseases At The Palm Of Your Hands

Posted by JitendraMore on September 25th, 2022

Early detection and control are possibly the best approaches, especially for developing countries that are ill-equipped to handle a full-blown endemic situation. Reader for lateral flow immunoassay are a new innovative technology to move diagnostics from being tied to labs to being accessible at homes.

The lateral flow immunoassay reader are a handy optimized reader for quantifying fluorescent particles by LED excitation via an optical sensor. The most enticing features are the low cost, wireless battery operation, and low power requirement, making the product stand out in a flood of innovative tools. Why go to the labs for results with the added days of wait and anxiety, when you can get results quickly at home?

How does the reader enhance the assay results:

The question in our minds is, 'why do we even need these readers?'. Demand for biosensors arises due to many selling points that have attracted customers like a moth to a flame. The primary concern for any patient is precision of results, guaranteed with the escalated sensitivity with enhanced colors of your assay. All this, along with ease of use and data storage, have contributed to the eminence of the machine, driving many market players to invest in the product market.

With applications across domains such as environmental sciences, food technology, and biomedicine, LFAs have provided a fertile opportunity for companies to develop assays. However, the main application of LFA reader remains in the domain of nucleic acid, and due to awareness raised by COVID-19, this domain is set to prosper in the next few years.

Developing, low-income countries find it challenging to provide for the basic needs of their citizens. This raises the need to introduce point-of-care tools for healthcare that are easily operable on top of being accessible. Abingdon Health has unveiled ADxLR5®, with next-generation technology with icon-driven software. Features such as touch screen user interface, stored calibration curve processing, barcode sample identification, and WiFi and wired connectivity have got the market on its toes for this particular release.

The COVID-19 pandemic shook the world. It brought the world to a standstill, not to mention the health problem people faced when there was stark unavailability of healthcare. Going to the hospital could mean catching an infection. There was a severe shortage of beds, healthcare professionals, and no means of public transport. Getting a COVID test was nothing short of a task in this situation. The research to make testing available at home was greatly supported at this time, with an infusion of large sums of money.

Another driver for the production of lateral flow immunoassay reader was the falsified results spreading panic across nations. In the times when WHO did not have answers, these diagnostic kits were our only saving grace. Many countries have turned entirely to antibody testing for dependable, easily scalable results ditching the need to set up more and more testing centers that increase the chances of infection insurmountably.

The COVID-19 pandemic catapulted LFAs into our daily life, with around 6 million deaths worldwide. One of the main hurdles faced during this pandemic was false results. With real-time PCR as the first line of defense, the baton is slowly being passed to antibody detection as it demonstrates 100% sensitivity and 87.5% specificity.

Keeping these stats in consideration, lateral flow immunoassay reader are in line to have an even more significant impact if the intrinsic quantitative analysis is introduced to monitor critical biomarkers pointing toward disease progression, along with medical treatment suggestions and other essential health monitoring.

This is what the new lateral flow immunoassay reader with CMOS image sensor is aimed at; with a chip fabricated in the technology of CMOS 0.35-μm, it can detect a nucleoprotein in a range of 0.5 ng/mL to 200 ng/mL. It is a practical, low-cost solution and has grasped the market's attention.

The relentless fight against corona continues, as the researchers at Harvard Medical School, Tianjin University, and McGill University have described yet another marvel to directly detect SARS-CoV-2 N protein with the help of the sandwich ELISA method. This on-chip test is said to give no false positives, making it one of the most accurate diagnostics yet.

One of the market's most prominent lateral flow immunoassay reader today is iPeak of MedIUL. These lateral flow immunoassay reader for in-vitro testing are at the peak of innovation when we talk about enhanced results: sample handling, labeling, and accurate reading, all in the shortest period. The highest growth has been realized in the last two years, as claimed by the company. The output data is digestible for even unskilled people to understand.