6 results about "Hook effect" patented technology

The hook effect or the prozone effect is an immunologic phenomenon whereby the effectiveness of antibodies to form immune complexes stops increasing with greater concentrations and then decreases with extremely high concentrations. An important practical relevance of the phenomenon is as a type of interference that plagues certain immunoassays and nephelometric assays, resulting in false negatives or inaccurately low results. Other common forms of interference include antibody interference, cross-reactivity and signal interference. The phenomenon is caused by very high concentrations of a particular analyte or antibody and is most prevalent in one-step (sandwich) immunoassays.