An evaluation of immunological methods based on the requirements of the clinical chemist

The practicability, operation time and cost of ligand binding assays are clearly more favourable than those of the possible and sometimes highly specific alternatives. At the same time, however, they have distinct weaknesses with respect to the criteria of analytical performance. For the routine determination of individual clinical chemical parameters, which are otherwise difficult to quantify, ligand binding assays (especially in those versions that do not use radioisotopes) are markedly superior to other methods. Chromatographic methods, however, offer greater advantages for the determination of profiles.