More and more people suffer from allergies and food intolerances. Laboratory diagnosis for these often takes long and can be inaccurate. Healthcare practitioners increasingly rely on point-of-care tests to avoid costly laboratory tests and quickly find solutions for their patients. In our interview, Dr Florian Eckhardt talks about the state of the art in allergy testing, the use of point-of-care-tests and MEDICA 2015.Dr Eckhardt, what is the state of the art for Allergy tests?Florian Eckhardt: Allergy and food intolerance testing are rapidly evolving diagnostics that address the needs of a growing trend worldwide of patients with allergies and food intolerances. The current state of the art allergy testing includes various manual and automatized approaches with increasing focus on customized allergy testing panels that are specific to different parts of the world. In addition, micro-fluidics based rapid point-of-care tests for aiding healthcare practitioners to diagnose during consultation and multiplexing based laboratory tests for testing with low volumes of patient samples are increasingly used in diagnostic routine as well.