Characteristics of autoantibody and its perspectives for clinical diagnostics

Disease-associated autoantibodies (AAB) are important for the diagnosis of respective autoimmune diseases (AID).Autoantibodies can also be used for monitoring of response to therapy and for prognostic purpose.However, significant biological heterogeneity of autoantibody response, the difficulty in simultaneously improving detection sensitivity and specificity of autoantibodies and the lack of standardization in detection methods lead to limitations in its clinical applications and some difficulties in explaining the test results.It is important to search for novel autoantibodies in sera, to establish and standardize automated detection platforms with good quality and to perform well-designed clinical evaluation in the future research and clinical applications of autoantibodies.（Clin J Lab Med，2012,35：193-196）