Immunoassays: Future prospects and possibilities

The coming years are anticipated to witness continuous innovation and breakthroughs in immunoassay (IA) formats, bioanalytical platforms, biosensing concepts, detection devices, and complementary technologies. The next-generation IAs, based on highly simplified IA formats, require only minimal process steps and critically reduced sample volumes without any washing steps. They will be fully automated, cost-effective, and equipped with smartphone- or gadget-based mobile healthcare capabilities. Therefore, they can be deployed at centralized, decentralized, remote, and personalized settings with minimal or no requirement for power supply and skilled analysts. The IA trend is strongly inclined toward IA formats to perform multiplex detection of biomarkers for a particular disease and offer clinical diagnosis and monitoring effectively via clinical score. The evolving trend toward smartphone-based IA technologies can extensively extend the outreach of diagnostics by providing personalized mobile healthcare monitoring and management.