sIL2R
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Soluble interleukin-2 receptor: a critical inflammatory biomarker comes of age
By Oliver Schmidt
The measurement of soluble interleukin-2 receptor (sIL-2R) levels in serum or plasma has become an important tool to evaluate immune activation in adults...
Soluble interleukin-2 receptor in sickness and in health
By Oliver Schmidt
The quantification of soluble interleukin-2 receptor (sIL-2R) in serum or plasma in adults has become an extremely useful tool for clinicians...
Myasthenia gravis
State-of-the-art assays for myasthenia gravis
By Constanze Drechsel
Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease affecting 14-20/100,000 people in the U.S.1 and 1-9/100,000 people in Europe.2 The sad truth is that most of those afflicted go undiagnosed. Myasthenia gravis causes severe muscle...
Myasthenia gravis assays: industry-leading kits are raising the bar
By Anne Hartenhauer
More than 90% of patients with signs and symptoms of myasthenia gravis can be readily detected and treated with a range of effective therapies. The key to early diagnosis and treatment that can lead to remission is the selection...
State-of-the-art assays for myasthenia gravis
By Anne Hartenhauer
Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease with an estimated prevalence of 14-20/100,000 population in the U.S.1 and 1-9 /100,000 population in Europe.2 Many affected individuals go undiagnosed. Myasthenia gravis can cause severe...
IVDR
Survive or thrive? IVDR for laboratory developed tests in mass-spectrometry
By Magali Wolff
You could say that the road to in vitro diagnostic medical devices regulation (IVDR) implementation has been rocky. We have read all of the documents, spent hours in meetings and felt our heart stop with every new announcement about...
Food Intolerance
Setting up food intolerance testing: 5 essential ingredients
By Hannah van Schijndel (Artemis) and Dajana Domik (Tecan)
It is estimated that up to 20% of the world’s population may have some degree of food intolerance, which can manifest itself in pathologies such as celiac disease, dermatitis, atopic eczema,...
Five challenges in developing reliable IgG ELISA-based food intolerance tests
By Nastya Yeska
IgG and IgG4-based ELISA testing is often recommended to reduce the guesswork in identifying food sensitivities in IBS, IBD and related pathologies, and is the most widely used immunological method.[i]1-4 However, many commercial...
The inside story on food intolerance: the case for IgG4 ELISA testing
By Nastya Yeska
There is a definite role for IgG4 testing when diagnosing and treating pathologies that are associated with elevated levels of specific IgGs, such as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and irritable bowel syndrome.¹,² This is...
More than a gut feeling: food intolerance and the role of specific IgG and IgG4 testing
By Nastya Yeska
Food intolerance or sensitivity to many common foods, such as gluten, dairy or other products, appears to be on the increase. This begs the question: does food intolerance really exist, or is it simply a trendy fad in today’s...
Neopterin
Considerations for choosing your neopterin assay
By Dajana Domik
Neopterin is a valuable diagnostic biomarker which can be applied in research and in clinical settings. As an inflammation marker, it is a global “catch all” biomarker that serves as an early warning system for many different...
Using neopterin as a high inflammation marker indicating infection in blood or urine
By Dajana Domik
Neopterin is a broad range inflammation marker which can be measured in the blood of patients and indicates a multitude of diseases from acute viral infections to autoimmune conditions.1 This marker can serve as an essential “catch...
Neopterin: The early warning indicator that could make all the difference
By Dajana Domik
When patients exhibit symptoms common to more than one disease or invading pathogen it is useful to have a universal biomarker that can help you narrow down the potential causes, monitor progress of an ongoing condition, and give you...
Saliva testing
The case for saliva testing in the diagnostics and management of female hormone imbalance
By Aron Gonshor (in collaboration with Nastya Yeska and Dajana Domik)
Female hormone levels have been measured using blood tests for decades.1 However, blood sampling is costly, invasive, and often logistically difficult. Consequently, there has...
Riding the waves: how saliva testing makes sense of female hormone levels
By Nastya Yeska
The accurate measurement of female hormone levels is at the very core of women’s reproductive health and general wellbeing, whether searching for potential causes of infertility, or treating debilitating premenstrual or menopausal...
Chewing the challenges: 5 steps to robust saliva testing for female hormones
By Nastya Yeska
Saliva-based tests are a reliable and proven method for measuring female hormone levels, as well as being highly accurate and painless for the patient.¹ This article takes you through five key steps to consider when setting up...
Diagnostic saliva hormone testing provides alternative to needles
By Magali Fischer/p>
Steroid analysis using a saliva sample first appeared in the scientific literature more than 40 years ago.1 Now, as then, saliva sampling presents an attractive alternative to blood testing because it is non-invasive, easily...
Spitting out the facts: saliva testing for female hormone imbalance
By Nastya Yeska
Female hormone levels have been measured using blood tests for decades.1 However, blood sampling is costly, invasive, and often logistically difficult, so there is a shift towards the adoption of tests based on more convenient and...
Women’s health and the advantages of saliva hormone testing
By Nastya Yeska
Women are affected by the ever-changing levels of their female sex hormones throughout all stages of their lives. These fluctuations may be normal or abnormal and may affect the development of a young woman’s secondary sexual...
Spit-and-measure testing – identifying over-production of cortisol
By Domink Bell
The presence of excess cortisol hormone in saliva can be an indication of a number of serious biochemical imbalances that include chronic stress, adrenal fatigue, obesity, diabetes and conditions like Cushing Syndrome. Increasingly,...
Benefits of saliva hormone testing
By Magali Fischer
A symptomatic menopausal woman may require periodic testing of her estrogen and progesterone levels to make necessary adjustments in the dosing of hormone replacement therapy. An athlete undergoes steroid hormone testing leading up...
The choice is clear: saliva vs. blood diagnostics for hormone testing
By Magali Wolff
Diagnostic testing has a long, bloody (i.e., blood-based) history, and when a physician orders a test, the usual response is to strap on a tourniquet, pull out a syringe, and extract a venous blood sample. For some tests, though,...
HMGB1
High Quality ELISA for measuring HMGB1 in COVID-19 samples
By Oliver Schmidt
HMGB1 is a key mediator in the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, and increased levels can be an important indicator for COVID-19 understanding and its prognosis. In this final piece in our series, we look at the performance of Tecan’s...
How to measure alarmin HMGB1 in SARS-CoV-2 immune response
By Oliver Schmidt
In the first article in this series, we looked at how HMGB1 has taken an increasingly important position as a key mediator in the immune response, playing a major role in many diseases, from cancer to coronavirus. There is now...
Exploring the role of HMGB1 in the immune response to COVID-19
By Oliver Schmidt
How the human body deals with infection depends on an individual’s immune response. When looking at the body’s response to SARS-CoV-2, the state of the immune system has a crucial impact on the clinical outcome. For example, HMGB1...
The gold standard ELISA for measuring HMGB1
By Oliver Schmidt
HMGB1 is a key mediator in the immune response and increased levels can be important indicators of disease. In this, the last in our series on HMGB1, we will look at the performance of the IBL HMGB1 ELISA Kit, which has been used...
What the alarmin HMGB1 teaches us about cellular stress response
By Oliver Schmidt
As a nuclear protein present in most cell types, HMGB1 (high mobility group box 1) is a key mediator of the immune system in health and disease. Interest in HMGB1 has increased dramatically as the protein has been shown to be...
Complete ELISA solution / Automatization
For data reproducibility: automation of ELISA test kit protocols wins
By Magali Fischer
Generating reproducible, accurate ELISA data starts with reliable reagents that are highly sensitive and specific. These are often available as kits that need to be incorporated into an...
Getting to the root of poor ELISA data reproducibility
By Magali Fischer
With more than 50% of preclinical results estimated to be irreproducible, the reliability of methods, assays, and protocols is a major concern in all areas of research. Many critical assay workflows, such as those for ELISA tests,...
Alzheimer
Diagnosing Alzheimer’s earlier: the biomarker breakthrough
By Alexandra Sommer
The race to find a way of spotting and treating Alzheimers at an early stage is heating up but there’s a long way still to go. Or is there?
Tecan Journal
Measuring sIL-2R Levels In Interstitial Lung Disease
St Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands, uses a soluble interleukin-2 receptor (sIL-2R) ELISA from Tecan in the investigation, management and monitoring of interstitial lung disease. This easy-to-use assay is the world’s first...
Several studies have shown that healthcare clowning has a strong positive effect on pediatric patients in general, but there is limited research into its impact on those with psychological disorders. RED NOSES Clowndoctors Austria – an organization...
A voyage of discovery: exploring the role of HMGB1 in trauma pathology
Trauma is the main cause of premature death internationally, resulting in more deaths in people under 40 years old than all other causes combined. Even trauma victims receiving hospital care have a high mortality rate, in part due to massive...
Diagnosing hormone-based disorders using saliva
Diagnosing hormone-based disorders using saliva samples dates back to the 1980s, but it is only the sensitivity improvements over the last decade that have led to saliva-based diagnostics becoming a viable alternative to blood testing. Biovis’...
Working together to untangle IVDR
The European Union’s In Vitro Diagnostics Regulation (IVDR) replaces the In Vitro Diagnostic Medical Devices Directive (IVDD), completely overhauling the regulations regarding pre- and post- market requirements for IVD devices. This has implications...
Salivary hormone testing – the blood of the 21st century?
Blood testing is ideal for a wide range of analytes, but it has limitations for hormone analysis. In Canada, FLUIDS iQ has turned to saliva as an alternative test matrix, which is proving an excellent choice for measuring the bioavailability of a...
Taking the stress out of cortisol measurements
The Health Psychology Lab at Brandeis University in the USA is using gold standard luminescence assays to monitor cortisol and other salivary biomarkers of stress. In addition to its own research projects, the Health Psychology Lab offers assay...
Digesting food intolerance testing
Food intolerances can have a major impact on the working and social life of an individual, affecting up to 45 % of the population. Unlike allergies, where a symptom appears as soon as a certain food is eaten, intolerances – chemical reactions that...
Using saliva to study hormones
Hormones are specialist chemical messengers that provide a communication system between different parts of the body. They affect everything from growth and metabolism to appetite and mood, while also playing a vital role in puberty and fertility....
Patients suffering from a number of different chronic diseases are turning to holistic healthcare provider RP Sanitas Humanus in the Netherlands for answers, frequently after conventional medicine has been unsuccessful. Food intolerances often lie...
Stressing the importance of quality assays
The Department of Psychology at TU Dresden is taking advantage of the quality and reproducibility of various IBL International immunoassays – including the Cortisol Saliva Luminescence Immunoassay – to investigate the link between steroid hormones...
Providing diagnostic solutions for Alzheimer’s disease
AIBL International, the latest addition to the Tecan Group, offers a range of microplate-based immunoassays to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, a devastating condition that significantly impacts the lives of both sufferers and their families....
IBL International joins the Tecan family
IBL International – a leading provider of microplate-based immunoassays – has recently become part of the Tecan Group. Offering one of the widest ranges of specialty diagnostic assays for use in research and clinical laboratories, IBL International...