Electrochemical immunosensing on board microfluidic chip platforms

Microfluidic devices as immunosensing platforms have had a great deal of attention in recent years, becoming an emergent technology in biomedical, pharmaceutical, environmental and food analysis. Combination of the remarkable features of microfluidic platforms with those of immunoassays produces a promising tool for selective, sensitive, automatic and point-of-care testing in real applications. In this article, we review and discuss different aspects of microfluidic material substrate, fluid handling, multiplexing, and, mainly, surface-modification and immunoreagent-immobilization strategies since 2005. Although different detection modes can be used in this kind of microfluidic immunosensing platform, the special features of electrochemistry have greatly expanded this technique, and electrochemical detection is common to the articles that we review. Finally, we comment on the future outlook for microfluidic immunosensing. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.