There is a void in the market for user-friendly multiplex rapid immunoassays. The few commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) multiplex assays in the conventional line format have inherent limitations due to stripes laid over one another.
The Blind Spot approach in this study may be of utility in point-of-care diagnostics, particularly in resource-limited settings to rapidly screen for a multitude of pathogens in one assay.
The advantage of the Blind Spot approach is that it is simple and inexpensive to print these patterns on nitrocellulose strips using currently available striping technologies/instruments such as BioDot.
Here researchers established the baseline comparison for a triple toxin assay to singleplex assays for Staphylococcus Enterotoxin B, Ricin A chain, and Botulinum toxin A complex and show equivalent performance by visual reading of results.
Read the study:
Blind Spot: A Braille Patterned Novel Multiplex Lateral Flow Immunoassay Sensor Array for the Detection of Biothreat Agents. ACS Omega, 23 August 2021.
