Nano-Technological Approaches to Improve the Efficiency of Bio-Assays

One of the biggest issues in today's healthcare industry is to find a very fast yet effective diagnostic platform, which is suitable for our busy lifestyle without compromising the detection efficiency. The major requirements of an efficient diagnostic platform can be summarized as minimum sample requirement, least reagent requirement, having options of multiple tests in a single platform, high through put analysis and last but never the least a non-expensive sample run. The largest contributor of the bio-assay industry is protein based chromogenic bio-assays, which depends on strong antigen-antibody interaction and high emissive properties of reporter dye molecule attached to the antigen. In reality, this apparently simple looking reaction system has to face several difficulties before an appreciable signal is received by the photo-detector to give an analysable dataset. With the rapid emergence of nanotechnology during last few decades, some of the critical problems have been solved [1-5 ]. However, a large number of unresolved issues still remain there. This editorial will briefly address some of those critical issues and how they have been tackled by nanotechnology. The two-most tunable variables of a bio-assay platform are the reporter molecules and the sensing platform as described by the Figure 1. We will describe both the issues separately in the next sections.