Immunoassays & co.: past, present, future?--A review and outlook from personal experience and involvement over the past 35 years.

This article has been designed to give a brief overview of antigen-antibody reactions, especially in the form used in immunoassays. The different types of label and assay design have been described briefly. The report has not been designed as a brief text book, so that diagrams referring to assay principles have been omitted. The number of tables and figures has been reduced to a minimum, the references being sufficient to enable the reader to go deeper into his areas of interest. The problems of internal and external quality assessment of immunoassays has been dealt with. Finally, a short section describes possible future trends in which immunoassay may play a role.