Multi-panel Urine Drug test Strips – Know How they Work

Multi-panel urine drug tests are used to detect a combination of 2 – 12 different drugs in one step. While conducting drug tests if we are not aware about the kind of drug the person is abusing, then these multi-panel drug test kits are more helpful. These are helpful in two ways. One we can find out the presence of drug, second, we will come to know about the type of drug. As these kits include all possible and most popularly used drugs, there are less chances for the person to escape from this kind of test. Let us check how these multi-panel drug test kits work.

Working principle:

Multi-panel drug test strips usually contain a device with number of absorbent ends depending on the number of drugs that a particular kit can identify. It also has a result area from where we can read the results. The result area consists of two regions called Test region denoted as T, and Control region, denoted as C. A pink colored line appears on either of these regions showing the test results.

When the absorbent end is dipped in the urine sample, the urine is absorbed into the device and mixes with the antibody-dye conjugate present in the device and flows to the pre-coated membrane. If the provided sample has zero or low drug concentration than the cut-off levels, the sample mixed with the anti-body dye conjugate binds to the drug-protein conjugate present in the Test Region (T) of the device. This results in the appearance of colored line in T region, which shows that the test is negative.

When the sample do have the drug metabolites equal or more than the cutoff then the drug sample binds to the antibody-dye conjugate and prevents it from binding to the drug-protein conjugate present in the T region. This prevents the development of the pink line in the T region, indicating the result as positive. However, to serve as a procedure control, a colored line will appear at the Control Region (C), ensuring that the test has performed properly. Hence, irrespective of the result there will be a pink line in the C region for both positive and negative results, absence of which indicates that the test is invalid.

This is the working principle of the multi-panel drug test kit and the display of positive results on different panels indicate the presence of that particular drug.