High-throughput screening in the diagnostics industry.

The diagnostics industry is constantly under pressure to bring innovation quicker to market and so the impetus to speed up product-development cycle times becomes greater. There are a number of steps in the product-development cycle where the application of high-throughput screening can help. In the case of lateral-flow immuno-diagnostics the selection of antibody reagents is paramount. In particular, rapid identification of antibody pairs that are able to 'sandwich' around the target antigen is required. One screen that has been applied successfully is the use of surface plasmon resonance biosensors like Biacore. Using such a system one can evaluate over 400 antibody pairings in under 5 days. Conventional approaches to screen this number of antibody pairs would take many months. Other automated screening systems like DELFIA can be used in processing the vast amount of tests required for clinical trials. In addition, the use of robotics to automate routine product testing can be used to shorten the product-development cycle.