What really distinguishes SAFIA from ELISA?

14.October.2025 • Svenja Elsner

Learn why SAFIA is a more efficient alternative to traditional ELISA in many applications.

Fewer steps – greater efficiency

A classic ELISA requires several washing steps to remove unbound antibodies. These steps not only make the process time-consuming, but also prone to errors. With SAFIA, on the other hand, the immunoassay is performed on particles – and not on the well surface, as is the case with ELISA. This completely eliminates the need for washing steps.

The result:

simpler pipetting
shorter hands-on time
significantly faster results

Multiplexing – multiple analytes in a single run

Another major advantage of SAFIA is multiplexing. Up to six mycotoxins can be determined simultaneously with just one SAFIA assay. With ELISA, this would require the use of six separate kits.

This means:

Less work
Significantly less material consumption
Faster results

This difference is also enormous in economic terms: since only one SAFIA kit is required instead of several ELISA kits, consumption costs are significantly reduced. Depending on the number of samples and mycotoxins to be determined, the cost savings can be up to 70%.

Precise results – confirmed by interlaboratory tests

The performance of SAFIA has been impressively confirmed in various interlaboratory tests:

SAFIA was able to correctly determine all samples as positive or negative.
In contrast, ELISA measurements often showed overquantification and widely varying recovery rates.
The results of SAFIA are comparable to the results of LC methods, which are considered the reference method.

These results underscore the high accuracy and reliability of the SAFIA method.

Validation data – high robustness across many matrices

While many ELISAs are only validated for a limited number of matrices, SAFIA has been successfully tested with a wide variety of different matrices.

The validation report is available upon request.
The data show that SAFIA is extremely robust against a wide variety of matrices, including challenging ones.

This makes SAFIA ideal for practical routine use in a wide variety of sample types.

False-positive results – better controlled with SAFIA

A common problem with ELISA is false-positive results, which often go unnoticed and can lead to misinterpretations.

With SAFIA, however, an internal control ensures that matrix interferences are detected. This makes it possible to see when substances in the sample influence the assay and could potentially cause false-positive results.

This increases the reliability of the results and gives users additional confidence in the evaluation of the measurement results.