There is a growing interest in the use of magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) for their application in quantitative and highly-sensitive biosensors. The use of them as labels of biological recognition events and their detection by means of some magnetic method constitutes a very promising strategy for quantitative high-sensitive lateral-flow assays.In the present article, we report the importance of nanoparticle functionalization for the improvement of sensitivity for a lateral flow immunoassay. More precisely, we have found that immobilization of IgG anti-hCG through its polysaccharide moieties on magnetic nanoparticles allows more successful recognition of the hCG hormone. Although we used the detection of hCG as a model in this work, the strategy of binding antibodies to MNPs through its sugar chains reported here is applicable to other antibodies. Its potential is huge as it will be very useful for the development of quantitative and high-sensitive lateral-flow assays for its use on human and veterinary, medicine, food and beverage manufacturing, pharmaceutical, medical biologics and personal care product production, environmental remediation, etc.