Nobody enjoys giving blood samples, but it’s a necessary part of many hospital stays and doctor visits. Soon we might not have to, thanks to a new device that can isolate biomarkers for different diseases using sound waves, from a single drop of blood, in around an hour.
Usually, blood tests involve taking a sample with the dreaded needle in the arm, which is then sent off to a lab to check for certain molecules that can indicate the presence or progression of a disease or condition. But that can take from several hours to a few days, which isn’t ideal for some fast-changing diseases – not to mention the discomfort or, for some, downright fear, associated with the collection method.
Now, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a new handheld device that can scan for given biomarkers in around one hour, from a single drop of blood. This means that potentially, blood samples could be taken from a finger prick like those used for diabetes, then analyzed right there from a patient’s bedside.
It’s built on an intriguing mechanism, which the team calls functional negative acoustic contrast particles (fNACPs). These cell-sized particles are designed to respond to pressure from sound waves, and can be coated with different materials so that they capture a specific biomarker, like viruses or proteins.
A small sample of blood from a patient is mixed with these fNACPs, and then placed into the handheld device. This then works like an acoustic pipette, blasting the mixture with sound waves. Since the particles are so responsive to these waves, they all get pushed to one side – carrying the biomarkers they’ve collected along with them.
Once they’re all against the wall of the chamber, the blood and other components can be flushed out. Fluorescent tags are then attached to the biomarkers and lit up with lasers, to calculate the amount present. The whole process takes place in one small device in under 70 minutes.
“We’re basically using sound waves to manipulate particles to rapidly isolate them from a really small volume of fluid,” said Cooper Thome, first author of the study. “It’s a whole new way of measuring blood biomarkers.”
The team tested the technique with antibodies against a protein called ovalbumin, found in egg whites and often used in vaccine production. And sure enough, the antibodies were detected even at low concentrations, as effectively as systems in wide use.
“In our paper, we demonstrate that this pipette and particle system can offer the same sensitivity and specificity as a gold-standard clinical test can but within an instrument that radically simplifies workflows,” said Wyatt Shields, senior author of the study. “It gives us the potential to perform blood diagnostics right at the patient’s bedside.”
The technique could be adapted to a wide range of biomarkers, associated with many types of diseases or health conditions. The team is now investigating ways to test for multiple biomarkers in one sample, and even make the device work on samples from multiple people at once. But for now, it remains a proof of concept, and there’s still plenty of work to be done before it could find its way into clinical use.
The research was published in the journal Science Advances. The team describes the work in the video below.
Source: CU Boulder