This breakthrough should help reduce stress on children and others whose blood is difficult to draw and enhance the accuracy of allergy diagnostics.
Toray aims to undertake large-scale verifications of the specimens of allergy sufferers and swiftly apply for in-vitro diagnostic certification.
Food, pollen, and other allergies afflict half of Japan’s population. Incidence rates are rising, particularly among infants and young adults. Infants often have multiple allergies.
It is common in medicine to identify such ailments by using in vitro diagnostic products that measure allergen-specific IgE antibody levels in the blood. An issue with simultaneously measuring allergen-specific IgE antibodies from small blood samples to alleviate stress has been that proteins, cells, and other contaminants in the blood impede accurate measurements.
Toray was able to attain high precision from measurements with small samples by combining the
In-house verification testing confirmed that Toray’s product, which simultaneously measures multiple allergy items from 20 microliters of blood, has a quantitative correlation exceeding 95% with existing in-vitro diagnostic products that measure single items.