A Quadruplex Ultrasensitive Immunoassay for Simultaneous Assessment of Human Reproductive Hormone Proteins in Multiple Biofluid Samples

Reproductive hormones play vital roles in reproductive health and can be used to assess a woman's ovarian function and diagnose diseases associated with reproductive endocrine disorders. As these hormones are important biomarkers for reproductive health monitoring and diagnosis, a rapid, high-throughput, and low-invasive detection and simultaneous assessment of the levels of multiple reproductive hormones has important clinical applications. In this work, a quadruplex ultrasensitive immunoassay was developed for simultaneous assessment of 4 human reproductive hormone proteins (follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH), prolactin (PRL), and anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH)) in a variety of human biofluid samples. This assay takes advantage of single-molecule imaging of microwell arrays and capture antibody beads as a reaction interface to construct multiplex bead array immunoassays. The analyte-bound beads can easily be parsed to individual wells and detected via fluorophores, emitting distinct wavelengths associated to the beads. As a result, this proposed quadruplex immunoassay exhibits four good 4-parameter logistic calibration curves ranging from 2.7 to 2000, 1.6 to 1200, 1.8 to 1300, and 0.3 to 220 pg/mL with limits of detection of 0.32, 0.28, 0.14, and 0.02 pg/mL for FSH, LH, PRL, and AMH, respectively. Furthermore, the developed quadruplex immunoassay was used to test clinical venous serum samples where it showed remarkable consistency with clinical test results in methodological comparison and the diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome. In addition, we successfully applied the ultrasensitive capability of this assay to the simultaneous testing and evaluation of four proteins in fingertip blood as well as urine samples, in which the urinary AMH level (1.42-156 pg/mL) was measured and assessed quantitatively for the first time.