Simple Plex: The Hands-Free, Low-Volume, Microfluidic ELISA Alternative

Standard ELISA techniques for detecting protein biomarkers in serum or other biological samples leave you with sensitivity that doesn't quite cut it, analyte cross-reactivity, and reproducibility that's ok at best. They're also pretty low throughput and need a lot of hands-on time. And each manual step introduces variability, so the only way to rule out human error is to run samples in duplicate. All of these drawbacks have prevented adoption of ELISA techniques when testing complex, multivariate diseases like sepsis, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and traumatic brain injury.

Ella automates all the steps of a Simple Plex™ assay and gets rid of many traditional ELISA challenges. So, you'll get more precise data without all the hassle in just one hour. It all happens on disposable Simple Plex cartridges which currently come in two flavors: a single-analyte (72 x 1) cartridge that lets you analyze one analyte in 72 different samples, or a multi-analyte cartridge (16 x 4) that lets you analyze up to 4 analytes in parallel on 16 different samples. Three mini ELISA replicates happen in multiple independent microfluidic channels, so there's no cross-reactivity from antibody pairs for other assays, and you get triplicate data for each sample. So you'll improve your sensitivity and be able to detect multiple analytes in a single sample - all with as little as 25 µL per sample.

In this application note, we'll explain how it all works and show you how Simple Plex assays give you better sensitivity and reproducibility than ELISA for protein biomarker detection in serum.