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This brief note addresses the historical background of the invention of the enzyme immunoassay (EIA) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). These assays were developed independently and simultaneously by the research group of Peter Perlmann and Eva Engvall at Stockholm University in Sweden and by the research group of Anton Schuurs and Bauke Van Weemen in The Netherlands. Today, fully automated instruments in medical laboratories around the world use the immunoassay principle with an enzyme as the reporter label for routine measurements of innumerable analytes in patient samples. The impact of EIA/ELISA is reflected in the overwhelmingly large number of times it has appeared as a keyword in the literature since the 1970s. Clinicians and their patients, medical laboratories, in vitro diagnostics manufacturers, and worldwide healthcare systems owe much to these four inventors.
© 2005 American Association for Clinical Chemistry
Enzyme immunoassay (EIA) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) have become household names for medical laboratories, manufacturers of in vitro diagnostic products, regulatory bodies, and external quality assessment and proficiency-testing organizations. This brief historical note spotlights the development of enzyme labels in immunoassay from the invention of this method in the 1960s through its development and early use during the 1970s and 1980s.
The first published EIA and ELISA systems differed in assay design, but both techniques are based on the principle of immunoassay with an enzyme rather than radioactivity as the reporter label. Two scientific research groups independently and simultaneously developed this idea and executed the necessary experiments to demonstrate its feasibility. The ELISA technique was conceptualized and developed by Peter Perlmann, principal investigator, and Eva Engvall at Stockholm University, Sweden, and the EIA technique by Anton Schuurs, principal investigator, and Bauke van Weemen at the Research Laboratories of NV Organon, Oss, The Netherlands.
RIA was first described in 1960 for measurement of endogenous plasma insulin by Solomon Berson and Rosalyn Yalow of the Veterans Administration Hospital in New York (1). Yalow would later be awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize for Medicine for "the development of the RIA for peptide hormones" (2), but because of his untimely death in 1972, Berson could not share the award. Also in 1960, Dr. Roger Ekins of Middlesex Hospital in London published his findings on "saturation analysis" used to...