Current Trends in Diagnostics
Many forms of chromatography have been used over the years in the clinical laboratory for the separation and quantification of a variety of clinically relevant analytes. The main advantages of HPLC method over other techniques are their high selectivity, sensitivity, reliability, versatility with low cost of operations. Its use in the clinical laboratory has steadily increased over the past decades as its unmatched analytical performance and versatility allows for testing of many different types of clinically relevant analytes.
Medical diagnosis should be fast, reliable, specific, accurate, and should minimize possibility of false positive. Diagnostics tools and methods with high degree of sensitivity and specificity aid in early detection of diseases and disorders; and hence can provide better prognosis. Cutting edge technology for medical diagnosis is very vital as it directly affects healthcare of the general population.
India is an ethnically diverse country with marked regional variations. This diversity is reflected in the presence of different hemoglobin variants in different ethnic groups. Due to migration, there is constant mixing of people from different regions. Many of these abnormal variants are of little clinical significance in heterozygous state, but when combined with other variants they may give rise to several severe diseases. Therefore, there is always need for a screening method that can detect maximum variants. HPLC has the advantage of quantifying Hb F and Hb A2 along with the detection of other variants in a single screening test.
HPLC being a versatile tool, has been used for low level quantitation of vitamins, nucleic acids, biogenic amines, TDM like, immunosuppressant, and so many. HPLC-based methods would remain the gold standard in clinical testing for many of the current as also for future biomarkers and therapeutic drugs.
Because of government initiatives and strict regulations, testing labs are forced to go for more selective, precise and automated tools like HPLC that would find central place in any diagnostic lab.
