Drivers of biodiagnostic development

Abstract

The promise of point-of-care medical diagnostics - tests that can be carried out at the site of patient care - is enormous, bringing the benefits of fast and reliable testing and allowing rapid decisions on the course of treatment to be made. To this end, much innovation is occurring in technologies for use in biodiagnostic tests. Assays based on nanomaterials, for example, are now beginning to make the transition from the laboratory to the clinic. But the potential for such assays to become part of routine medical testing depends on many scientific factors, including sensitivity, selectivity and versatility, as well as technological, financial and policy factors.

Figure 1. High-sensitivity detection can allow less invasive disease diagnosis: Alzheimer’s disease example

New technologies with higher sensitivities (lower limits of detection) allow markers to be detected at locations distant from the brain, for example in the cerebrospinal fluid, the blood, or even the urine or sweat. In this example, relevant technologies are indicated to illustrate the concept. Depending on the disease marker and the disease, the relevance of a given diagnostic tool will change.