Immunoassay is the most common technique used by clinical laboratories for therapeutic drug monitoring.
Antibodies that recognize drugs can be developed. Although most drugs are much too small to evoke an immune response, scientists can conjugate drugs to immunogenic proteins to produce antibodies that recognize drug-specific epitopes.
There are several methods that utilize the principals of immunoassay for detection and quantification of therapeutic drugs in serum. Some of these methods are:
- Particle-enhanced turbidimetric inhibition immunoassay (PETINIA)
- Fluorescence Polarization Immunoassay (FPIA)
- Chemiluminescent assays
