Biological testing
tool, Scan-Drop, tests in fraction of time and cost of industry standard
A single instrument
that can conduct a wide range of biological scans in a fraction of the time and
cost of industry standard equipment has been developed. It uses considerably
less material and ultra-sensitive detection methods to do the same thing.
Scan Drop, is a portable instrument no bigger than a shoebox that has the
capacity to detect a variety of biological specimen. For that reason it will
benefit a wide range of users beyond the medical community, including
environmental monitoring and basic scientific research.
North-eastern
University professor of pharmaceutical sciences, Tania Konry, has developed a
single instrument that can conduct a wide range of biological scans in a
fraction of the time and cost of industry standard equipment. That's because it
uses considerably less material and ultra-sensitive detection methods to do the
same thing.
Currently, researchers face enormous time constraints and financial
hurdles from having to run these analyses on a regular basis. Hundreds of
dollars and 24 hours are what's required to scan biological materials for
important bio-markers that signal diseases such as diabetes or cancer. And
suppose you wanted to monitor live cancer cells. For that you'd have to use an
entirely different method. It takes just as long but requires a whole other set
of expensive top-end instrumentation. Want to look at bacteria instead? Be
prepared to wait a few days for it to grow before you can get a meaningful
result.
Konry's creation, ScanDrop, is a portable instrument no bigger
than a shoebox that has the capacity to detect a variety of biological
specimen. For that reason it will benefit a wide range of users beyond the
medical community, including environmental monitoring and basic scientific
research.
The instrument acts as a miniature science lab, of sorts. It
contains a tiny chip, made of polymer or glass, that is connected to equally
tiny tubes. An extremely small-volume liquid sample-whether it's water or a
biological fluid such as serum-flows in one of those tubes, through the
lab-on-a-chip device, and out the other side. While inside, the sample is
exposed to a slug of microscopic beads fictionalized to react with the lab
test's search parameters. For example, one type of bead could be covered with
antibodies that selectively bind to e. coli to test water quality. Other types
could detect cancer bio-markers or bind to the tetanus virus to test for
immunity.
"It can be any biological agent," Konry said. "We
take the same approach."
The beads fluoresce when the specific marker or cell in question
has been detected; from there, an analysis by Scan-Drop can provide the
concentration levels of that marker or cell.
Because the volumes being tested with Scan Drop are so small, the
testing time dwindles to just minutes. This means you could get near-real time
measures of a changing sample-be it bacteria levels in a flowing body of water
or dynamic insulin levels in the bloodstream of a person with diabetes.
Konry noted that not only are other testing mechanisms
prohibitively expensive, but they are also fairly useless in the
field-particularly in remote areas-because the instruments are large and
require long times for analysis. By comparison, Scan Drop's portability makes it
much more functional and efficient in the field.
Her team recently joined forces with a group at the University
of California at Berkeley, which developed software that can remotely control
Scan Drop's activity from anywhere on the planet.
This functionality could
be particularly useful when the instrument is set up in the field to
continuously monitor the environment. The achievement, Konry said, adds yet
another level of efficiency to the system.