Researchers from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory had designed a technique, PRISM, that performed with the same accuracy as ELISAs in a comparison analysis study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.
"Clinical tests have almost always used antibodies to measure biomarkers because antibodies can provide good sensitivity," said lead author Wei-Jun Qian. "But it often takes a year and a half to develop antibodies as tools. Antibody development is one of the bottlenecks for new biomarker studies in disease and systems biology research."
PRISM utilized HPLC to concentrate the targeted proteins and mass spectroscopy to detect the proteins. Such a breakthrough means detection with high sensitivity is possible without using antibodies.