Future trends

A huge development in the field of autoantibody has been obtained over the last decade, but much more innovation is expected in the coming years. The widespread use of autoantibody testing raised the need of more standardization of the diagnostic assays. Moreover, the initial paradigm "one autoantibody for one disease" does not appear to be useful any longer. An autoantibody profile does seem to offer more diagnostic and prognostic power than the determination of single autoantibody specificity. The consequence is the use of new assays to detect different autoantibodies. In line with this is the development of multiplex technologies as diagnostic platforms and, as a consequence, the need of more automatization. Molecular biology is now offering additional possibilities such as the use of monoclonal antibodies with specificities for well-defined autoantigens to be used as new reproducible standardization reagents. Furthermore, the identification of antigenic epitopes allows the setting up of more sensitive/specific assays.