Thursday, August 23, 2012

Supersmall lab-on-a-chip is superfast

This really seems like some excellent technology to prove what type of stroke you had. And if we are going to continue down the tPA route then we had better get a faster, less technology intensive and less education needed way of determining the type of stroke you had.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/343100/title/Supersmall_lab-on-a-chip_is_superfast
Looking for a specific protein in a drop of blood is like trying to find a notorious white whale on the seven seas — it takes some time. But a new device quickly filters the ocean of molecules in a blood sample, capturing proteins that may warn of an impending heart attack or out-of-whack insulin levels. Besides detecting potential emergencies, such devices could minimize the fraught days a patient spends waiting for lab results, providing them in mere minutes.
http://www.genomeweb.com//node/1119771?hq_e=el&
Researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel have developed a nanowire-based device to separate and analyze protein biomarkers in blood samples. As they report in Nano Letters, the filtering, separation, and analysis all occurs on a single chip — and rapidly. The chip, adds ScienceNews, is made of two compartments, one that is full of a "forest" of densely packed nanowires coated with protein-specific antibodies and one that contains flat nanowires, also coated with antibodies, that are connected to electrodes. The researchers tested their device on its ability to detect troponin T, which it was able to do sensitively and in less than 10 minutes. "It's clever," Yale University's Tarek Fahmy tells ScienceNews. "They are doing separation and concentration on the same chip." 
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl3021889
Importantly, this is the first demonstration of an all-NWs device for the whole direct analysis of blood samples on a single chip, able to selectively collect and separate specific low abundant proteins, while easily removing unwanted blood components (proteins, cells) and achieving desalting effects, without the requirement of time-consuming centrifugation steps, the use of desalting or affinity columns.

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