Department of Pharmacy, University of Naples "Federico II", Via Domenico Montesano 49, 80131 Naples, Italy.
Department of Chemistry, Università degli Studi di Torino, 10124 Turin, Italy.
Anal Chem. 2024 Feb 13;96(6):2297-2302. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.3c04078. Epub 2024 Jan 30.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) strips as the most known point-of-care (POC) devices enabling rapid and easy detection of relevant biomarkers by nonspecialists. However, these diagnostic tests are usually associated with the qualitative detection of the biomarker of interest. Alternatively, electrochemical-based diagnostics, especially known for diabetes care, enable quantitative determination of biomarkers. From an analytical point perspective, the combination of the two approaches might represent a step forward for the POC world: in fact, electrochemical transduction is attractive to be integrated into LFIA strips due to its simplicity, high sensitivity, fast signal generation, and cost effectiveness. In this work, a LFIA strip has been combined with an electrochemical transduction, yielding an electrochemical LFIA (eLFIA). As a proof-of-concept method, the detection of prostate-specific antigen has been carried out by combining a printed-electrochemical strip with the traditional LFIA tests. The electrochemical detection has been based on the measurement of Au ions produced from the dissolution of the gold nanoparticles previously captured on the test line. The analytical performances obtained at LFIA and eLFIA were compared, highlighting how the use of differential pulse voltammetry allowed for a lower detection limit (2.5-fold), respectively, 0.38 and 0.15 ng/mL, but increasing the time of analysis. Although the correlation between the two architectures confirmed the satisfactory agreement of outputs, this technical note has been thought to provide the reader a fair statement with regard to the strength and drawbacks about combining the two (apparently) competitor devices in a diagnostics field, namely, LFIA and electrochemical strips.
新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情凸显了侧向流动免疫分析（LFIA）条带作为最知名的即时检测（POC）设备的作用，使非专业人员能够快速轻松地检测相关生物标志物。然而，这些诊断测试通常与对感兴趣的生物标志物的定性检测相关联。相比之下，基于电化学的诊断方法，特别是在糖尿病护理方面，能够定量测定生物标志物。从分析的角度来看，这两种方法的结合可能代表着 POC 领域的一个进步：实际上，由于其简单性、高灵敏度、快速信号生成和成本效益，电化学转换很有吸引力，可以集成到 LFIA 条带中。在这项工作中，将 LFIA 条带与电化学转换相结合，得到电化学 LFIA（eLFIA）。作为一种概念验证方法，通过将印刷电化学条带与传统 LFIA 测试相结合，实现了对前列腺特异性抗原的检测。电化学检测基于先前捕获在测试线上的金纳米粒子溶解产生的金离子的测量。比较了 LFIA 和 eLFIA 的分析性能，结果表明，差分脉冲伏安法的使用分别允许检测限降低（2.5 倍），即 0.38 和 0.15ng/mL，但增加了分析时间。尽管两种架构之间的相关性证实了输出结果的令人满意的一致性，但本技术说明旨在为读者提供关于在诊断领域将两种（显然）竞争设备（LFIA 和电化学条带）结合起来的优势和劣势的公平陈述。
