New Diagnostic Tool Gives Tests Results From Just One Finger Prick in Only an Hour

Modern medicine can usually require a lot of tests to make a proper diagnosis. So no visit to a clinic or hospital is complete without giving blood samples. And that can mean having to give vials of blood through a needle in your arm that then has to be sent to a lab. The results can take hours or even days to come back, according to New Atlas.

Now, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a new diagnostic tool, a hand-held device, that can use just one drop of blood from a finger prick to scan for specific biomarkers. The results take only an hour. This ground-breaking research was published on October 16 in the journal Science Advances.

“We’ve developed a technology that is very user friendly, can be deployed in various settings and provides valuable diagnostic information in a short time frame,” senior author Wyatt Shields, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at CU Boulder, said in a press release from the university.

How it works
The hand-held device works on what the researchers call functional negative acoustic contrast particles (fNACPs). These tiny cell sized particles can be coated with different materials to detect specific biomarkers like proteins or viruses, according to the press release.

When the patients’ blood is put in the device through a pipette, it is blasted with sound waves that separate the biomarkers from the blood. This pushes the particles to one side of the chamber where the biomarkers are then labeled with fluorescents and then lasers are used to determine the amount of the biomarkers that are present. The entire process takes less than 70 seconds.

The concept is similar to those used in other rapid tests – like home pregnancy or COVID tests – that can give the user a quick yes or no answer to whether a specific biomarker is present but these tests aren’t sensitive enough to detect very small results, according to a press release. The hand-held diagnostic device was designed to overcome these limitations.

“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 Shields. “It gives us the potential to perform blood diagnostics right at the patient’s bedside.”

This can be used to quickly assess whether the patient is infectious, what the viral load is, and how fast it is growing. The researchers said that this could also help determine whether a patient needs a booster shot, to test for allergies, and to detect proteins that are associated with some cancers.

Proof of concept

The study is a proof of concept and more research is necessary before the hand-held device can be produced. The next step is to apply for patents.

The research team is looking at ways that the technology can work for multiple patients or test for multiple biomarkers at the same time. This would make the device a very useful tool for mobile clinics that are used in rural areas or in small isolated clinics.

 “We think this has a lot of potential to address some of the longstanding challenges that have come from having to take a blood sample from a patient, haul it off to a lab and wait to get results back,” said Shields.

This device has a lot of promise to democratize medicine by making  state-of-the-art diagnostic tools available for people who live in rural areas or developing countries.This could make a real difference in the health of people around the globe.

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