Development of electrochemical immunosensors towards point of care diagnostics

Electrochemical immunosensors (El) has attracted numerous interests due to its inherent benefits over the other transduction schemes, such as a high sensitivity, ease of use, a possible automation and integration in compact analytical devices, mostly cheap and relatively simple technology of its production. Thus, EIs have great potential in point of care (POC) diagnostics for early detection of diseases. During last decades, numerous efforts have been put into EIs development. Firstly, different fabrication methods and amplification strategies have been employed to achieve high sensitivity. To be pointed, nanotechnology has been involved in the fabrication and signal amplification of EIs, which present great superiority. Secondly, El arrays have been used for multiparametric analysis. Thirdly, several attempts have been made to construct integrated systems, which showed promising applications for POC test. Several of them are commercially available for POC use. Herein, we will review briefly the recent achievements and progress in developing EIs towards POC diagnostics. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.