Study Biology to Work in Immunoassay Development
Are you a biology student and looking for a career that offers an opportunity to diagnose and treat diseases? If you are, immunoassay development is a field you may want to consider. Immunoassays detect disease biomarkers in patient’s samples and allow for the detection of cancers, viruses and various pathogens by using the relationship between antibodies and antigens. Diagnostic immunoassays such as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), chemiluminescence immunoassay (CLIA) and fluorescent immunoassay (FIA) are widely used but have a limited capacity to restrict fast progressing diseases.
ELISA which is considered the gold standard of immunoassays, needs several days to provide diagnostic results and it needs specialists and large equipment. During this time, spread of disease through communities can be massive and the disease advancement in patients can be deadly. Due to this, numerous efforts are being made for the development of fast, extremely sensitive, point of care devices. Even some devices have been designed that have reduced the waiting time for the result to less than an hour. There are many reasons to study Biology to work in immunoassay development, but knowing it can help save lives certainly makes it a noble career.
General guidelines to help you in the development, optimization and validation of immunoassays
Immunoassays are the go-to method to quantify unknown concentrations of an analyte in any sample. To ensure accuracy, it’s important that proper assay development criteria (such as optimal signal window and standard deviation) be met before beginning optimisation steps. Once these parameters have been successfully established, you’ll need to develop your immunoassay – a process commonly referred to as ‘proof of concept’. The optimization phase involves determining the quantifiable range by calculating precision profiles within a certain matrix where samples will eventually be measured; this is done via spiked recovery tests.
So, you can imagine how immunoassays are important in various bioanalytical settings like biopharmaceutical analysis, clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, food testing and security. An accurate early-stage detection of analytes is a critical requirement for all bioanalytical settings to effectively monitor and manage the quality of biopharmaceutical drugs, environment and foods.
As you know, mere antibody generation and antibody customization isn’t your last stop in the research against diseases. For simplified detection, working to develop custom antibody conjugation is essential. Labelling your antibody with horseradish peroxidase (HRP) offers sensitive enzymatic detection in IHC. Biotin labelling offers the flexibility of using a variety of labelled avidin. Lastly, labelling your antibody with fluorophores allows for a means of direct detection, eliminating the requirement of juggling multiple secondary antibodies while visualizing or flow sorting with multiple markers. Here’s where you can offer conjugation and labelling services with your custom antibody production and conjugation for organized processing and even cost savi
You can even offer antibody generation services to researchers who have no antibody to modify and enable them to create custom solutions to facilitate their research.
So, you can see what a vast field is waiting for you in Biology in the form of immunoassay development and custom antibody conjugation. We hope that you’ll find these fields interesting enough to choose them as your career. All the best!
