Towards peptide-based diagnostics

摘要

In the last years new perspectives in the development of in vitro diagnostics opened a future for more efficient and reliable technologies particularly to help the management of immune-mediated diseases not only autoimmune diseases, but also different cancer forms. In fact more and more diseases are recognised to be related to imperfect performance of the immune system. Unfortunately the mechanism triggering these immune responses is possibly due to several concomitant events: not only a genetic predisposition, but also environmental factors (i.e., bacterial and/or viral infections), as well as administration of food contaminants or the presence in the body of defective metabolites which could contribute to such devastating diseases. For that reason identification and characterisation of antigens triggering immune responses is a great challenge. Most of classical immunoassays are based on molecules that do not reproduce exactly the native antigens involved in triggering such immune responses.