The Lateral Flow Immunoassay (LFIA) is by far one of the most successful analytical platforms to perform the on-site detection of target substances. LFIA can be considered as a sort of lab-in-a-hand and, together with other point-of-need tests, has represented a paradigm shift from sample-to-lab to lab-to-sample aiming to improve decision making and turnaround time. The features of LFIAs made them a very attractive tool in clinical diagnostic where they can improve patient care by enabling more prompt diagnosis and treatment decisions. The rapidity, simplicity, relative cost-effectiveness, and the possibility to be used by nonskilled personnel contributed to the wide acceptance of LFIAs. As a consequence, from the detection of molecules, organisms, and (bio)markers for clinical purposes, the LFIA application has been rapidly extended to other fields, including food and feed safety, veterinary medicine, environmental control, and many others. This review aims to provide readers with a 10-years overview of applications, outlining the trends for the main application fields and the relative compounded annual growth rates. Moreover, future perspectives and challenges are discussed.

Simultaneous measurement of different substances from a single sample is an emerging issue for achieving efficient and high-throughput detection in several fields of application. Although immunoanalytical techniques have well-established and prevailing advantages over alternative screening analytical platforms, one of the incoming challenges for immunoassay is exact multiplexing. Lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) is a leading immunoanalytical technique for onsite analysis, thanks to its simplicity, rapidity, and cost-effectiveness. Moreover, LFIA architecture is adaptable to multiplexing, and is therefore a possible answer to the pressing demand of multiplexing point-of-need analysis. This review presents an overview of diverse approaches for multiplex LFIA, with a special focus on strategies based on new types of magnetic, fluorescent, and colored labels.