Micronutrient deficiencies (MNDs) disproportionately affect children and women of reproductive age in low- and middle-income countries. MNDs can significantly reduce quality of life and increase the risk of mortality if left untreated. Public health surveillance programs are needed to identify populations at risk and determine appropriate interventions.

In 2017, PATH and Quansys Biosciences launched the Q-Plex™ Human Micronutrient (7-Plex), an affordable, accurate, and easy to implement and use multiplex ELISA which required relatively little training or specialized equipment to run. After launch, the 7-plex assay was tested extensively by labs outside of Quansys Biosciences and PATH to verify performance. The testing demonstrated an acceptable correlation for many of the analytes but identified some concerns about data correlation with established reference methods.

This new version 2.0 of the 7-plex assay is further optimized to give a more accurate correlation to the 7 analytes with a specific focus on ferritin, RBP, CRP, and AGP reference values. This v2.0 of the 7-plex assay no longer requires a plate shaker throughout the incubation steps of the protocol. This not only eases the burden of equipment requirements but also eliminates any variability generated from differences between plate shakers across laboratories.